Principal Engineer - Serko.ai Experience

About Serko

Serko is a pioneering technology platform specializing in global business travel and expense solutions. Joining Serko means becoming part of a diverse and passionate team of travelers and technologists who utilize the world's foremost business travel marketplace. We value equality and diversity, fostering an authentic and inclusive environment that drives meaningful change in the travel industry. With a growing presence in New Zealand, Australia, North America, China, and a new hub in Bengaluru, India, we are expanding globally and seeking professionals from various backgrounds to build a world-class team and product.

Role Overview

As a Principal Engineer within the Serko.ai Experience team, you will play a pivotal technical leadership role, particularly focused on the application experience layer across multiple pods. This position comes with significant autonomy to oversee major projects end-to-end, make critical daily technical decisions, and resolve complex system-wide challenges. Your efforts will enhance our agentic delivery systems, guide solution architecture, and clarify intricate engineering problems beyond individual team scopes.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead system-wide initiatives by establishing high standards for our agentic delivery systems, focusing on reliability, speed, and trustworthiness through advanced engineering and automated quality checks.
• Advance engineering excellence by collaborating early in solution designs, enforcing quality benchmarks, mentoring senior engineering staff, and guiding teams—especially at the customer-facing experience layer—to deliver high-impact outcomes.
• Drive the adoption of agentic AI by evaluating and integrating emerging AI technologies responsibly and at scale across the product range.
• Manage strategic technology transitions including cross-departmental service handovers, ensuring alignment across different regions and business units.
• Bridge technology and business by representing Serko.ai Experience in executive-level planning and roadmapping to align engineering decisions with broader company objectives.

Qualifications & Skills

• Expertise in modern full-stack and front-end technologies, notably Next.js, React, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS, with a strong focus on building accessible and refined customer-facing applications; proficiency in Python is advantageous.
• Demonstrated experience leading significant technical projects independently, managing cross-team dependencies across time zones, and making high-impact architectural choices that facilitate rapid progress.
• Strong knowledge of AI concepts and agentic technologies, ensuring safe and scalable product integration, coupled with practical use of AI-assisted tools to enhance engineering productivity.
• Experience with systems infrastructure and platform integration, including the incorporation of shared platform services into active products and improving core developer infrastructure such as CI/CD pipelines, test automation, and development environments; familiarity with design systems, component architecture, and responsive, accessible UI design.
• Excellent collaboration and mentorship capabilities, with a history of co-leading engineering initiatives alongside principal peers, fostering solution design without hindering team ownership.

Employee Benefits

• Competitive base salary package.
• KiwiSaver with employer matching contributions up to 3.5% of salary and life insurance coverage.
• Health and wellbeing support including discounted Southern Cross Health Insurance, confidential counseling services, dedicated wellbeing and voluntary leave, plus complimentary flu vaccinations.
• Commitment to professional growth featuring access to learning and development platforms, dedicated budgets, and opportunities for career advancement ownership.