Technical Lead, AI Software Engineer

📋 Description

• • Lead the creation of a brand-new, AI-driven engineering squad inside IDEXX Veterinary Software, Auckland. You will be the founding technical authority for a team whose sole mission is to make every other engineering tribe faster, smarter, and happier through AI.
• • Architect and deliver scalable AI systems that automate code generation, intelligent debugging, automated testing, and self-healing CI/CD pipelines. The goal is to cut cycle time and cognitive load so developers can focus on features that improve animal health outcomes.
• • Prototype and productionize autonomous, agentic AI systems that can reason over veterinary data, predict diagnostic needs, and adapt user experiences in real time. These agents will run on our cloud-native, event-driven platform and must be secure, explainable, and compliant with global data regulations.
• • Drive the technical roadmap for AI developer-experience tooling, selecting the right mix of generative models, retrieval-augmented generation, and classic ML to solve each pain-point. You will own model selection, fine-tuning, evaluation, and MLOps from notebook to production.
• • Champion a culture of experimentation by running internal hack-weeks, brown-bags, and guild sessions that teach prompt engineering, agent design patterns, and responsible AI practices across 200+ engineers in Auckland and global hubs.
• • Partner with Product, UX, Security, and Data Science to embed AI features seamlessly into practice-management, diagnostics, payments, and client-engagement products. You will translate complex veterinary workflows into elegant AI solutions that delight veterinarians and pet owners.
• • Mentor senior and junior engineers, conducting rigorous code reviews, pair-programming sessions, and career-path conversations. You will grow a pipeline of AI talent that can sustain innovation long after the first prototypes ship.
• • Establish observability and reliability standards for AI services—think latency SLOs, drift detection, shadow deployments, and automated rollback—so every model behaves as predictably as the rest of our micro-service mesh.
• • Contribute to open-source communities and publish technical blogs that showcase IDEXX’s thought leadership in AI for animal health, raising our profile among researchers, veterinarians, and prospective hires.
• • Stay on the bleeding edge by evaluating emerging foundation models, vector databases, and orchestration frameworks, then distilling the noise into clear recommendations that keep our stack modern yet maintainable.
• • Influence executive leadership with crisp data on ROI, developer productivity metrics, and customer impact, ensuring continued investment in AI initiatives that align with IDEXX’s mission to enhance the health and well-being of pets, people, and livestock worldwide.