Director of Engineering - Applied AI

Serko is a cutting-edge tech platform in global business travel & expense technology. When you join Serko, you become part of a team of passionate travellers and technologists bringing people together, using the world’s leading business travel marketplace. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer, we embrace the richness of diversity, showing up authentically to create a positive impact. There's an exciting road ahead of us, where travel needs real, impactful change.

With offices in New Zealand, Australia, North America, and China, we are thrilled to be expanding our global footprint, landing our new hub in Bengaluru, India. With rapid a growth plan in place for India, we’re hiring people from different backgrounds, experiences, abilities, and perspectives to help us build a world-class team and product.

We're building a greenfield AI-native travel booking product designed specifically for the US market—an intent-driven conversational experience that transforms natural language into policy-compliant, bookable trips.
This is a rare opportunity to define architecture and engineering standards for a new AI product from near-zero, operating with startup pace and autonomy while backed by an ASX-listed company with substantial resources.

We’re building production-grade agentic AI systems that power real product outcomes. As Director of Engineering, Applied AI you’ll be a hands-on technical leader who ships robust, scalable AI features, grows engineering capability, and aligns execution to business goals. This is not a research role — you’ll deliver production systems, remove technical risk, and create repeatable engineering practices.

Expect to balance hands-on engineering with strategic leadership. You’ll write production-worthy code, own architecture decisions, mentor other engineers, and collaborate with stakeholders across the US West Coast and New Zealand time zones. You’ll have meaningful autonomy—to define both what we build and how we build it.

What You’ll Do

• Ship production agentic/LLM-based features with predictable cadence and measurable outcomes.
• Reduce technical debt and operational incidents while improving deployment velocity.
• Build and scale multiple high-performing engineering teams (hiring, mentoring, performance).
• Set engineering standards for inference, evaluation, monitoring, and observability for ML services.
• Partner with Product, Research, and GTM to prioritize use cases and turn prototypes into shipped features.

What You’ll Bring
Essential

• 8 years leading engineering teams and 5 years building production ML / LLM systems end-to-end.
• Hands-on experience deploying LLMs/agentic systems, model integrations, or AI inference at scale.
• Strong track record of delivering platform reliability, operational excellence, and reducing tech debt.
• Excellent cross-functional communication with Product and business leaders.
• Based in the Bay Area or willing to work West-coast hours.

Nice-to-Have

• Experience with RLHF/RLAIF, model serving stacks, or large scale data pipelines.
• Background in knowledge retrieval, hybrid search, or agent orchestration frameworks.

At Serko we aim to create a place where people can come and do their best work.  This means you’ll be operating in an environment with great tools and support to enable you to perform at the highest level of your abilities, producing high-quality, and delivering innovative and efficient results. Our people are fully engaged, continuously improving, and encouraged to make an impact.

Some of the benefits of working at Serko are:

• A competitive base pay
• Medical Benefits
• Discretionary incentive plan based on individual and company performance
• Focus on development: Access to a learning & development platform and opportunity for you to own your career pathways
• Flexible work policy.

How to Apply

Hit the ‘apply’ button now, or explore more about what it’s like to work at Serko and all our global opportunities at  .

Check out our other great opportunities & video footage about life a Serko, at www.serko.com/careers

If this sounds like you, then please click on the "Apply" button and follow the prompts.