AI Product Engineer (Typescript/Angular/Java)

AI Product Engineer (Typescript/Angular/Java)

HI Technology & Innovation

New Zealand (remote) • Full-time • Construction technology client

Compensation: NZD 8,000–12,000 per month

About the role

We’re looking for an AI Product Engineer in New Zealand to work on a focused, high-energy build for one of our long-standing construction technology clients. This is a hands-on engineering role with a strong product streak running through it. You won’t just be handed a ticket and told to code it. You’ll be working with stakeholders helping to work out what’s worth building in the first place, then going away and shipping it.

The work kicks off as a four-month sprint aimed at delivering a handful of well-chosen features and improvements, with a good chance of extending into longer-term work if things go well. Most of what you’ll touch sits in greenfield or loosely-coupled areas of the product, so you can move quickly without getting tangled up in years of legacy. You’ll be given a data model and a clear sense of the outcome we’re after, and from there a lot of the ‘how’ is yours to figure out.

AI is central to how we work. We use modern agentic coding tools every day, and we treat them as an accelerant for a strong senior engineer rather than a replacement for one. Generating code has become the easy part. The hard part, and the part we really care about, is knowing what to build and keeping the thing stable and maintainable long after it ships.

What you’ll be doing

• Sitting with product and client stakeholders to understand the real problem, then helping shape it into something concrete that can actually be built.

• Owning features end to end, from early scoping and design through to building, testing and getting them live.

• Using AI coding agents to move fast, while staying firmly in control of the quality, structure and long-term health of the code.

• Building and integrating AI into features, refining the prompts, evaluations and guardrails that make AI-assisted features behave reliably in production.

• Working against a defined data model and a clear contract, and flagging early when something doesn’t add up rather than building the wrong thing quickly.

• Feeding what you learn back to the product and client teams, so each iteration is sharper than the last.

What good looks like

The people who thrive in this role are part engineer and part product thinker. They can hold a conversation with a non-technical stakeholder, get to the heart of what someone actually needs, and translate that into a sensible technical plan. They’re just as comfortable pushing back on an idea that isn’t worth building as they are shipping one that is.

• Strong product instinct. You ask why we’re building something before you ask how, and you can spot when shipping the wrong thing quickly is worse than shipping the right thing a little slower.

• Genuinely stakeholder-facing. You can walk into a client’s world, understand their workflow, and quickly find the real blocker rather than the one that was first described to you.

• End-to-end ownership. You’re happy across the front end, back end and the data, and you can carry a feature all the way to production without waiting to be told each next step.

• Fluent with AI as a tool. You understand what today’s models and coding agents are good and bad at, and you make smart calls about where to lean on them and where not to.

• Builds for the long run. You write code other people can understand and maintain, because you’ve been the one holding the pager when a quick hack falls over in production.

• Clear communicator. You can explain a technical trade-off to a product lead, a client, or another engineer, and can get all three on the same page.

The stack you’ll work in

You’ll be building in a TypeScript and Angular front end, with a back end written mainly in Java and a little Python. Some of the work we have in mind sits around API integrations, and that part is built in Java, so genuine Java strength matters for this role.

• Front end. TypeScript with Angular.

• Back end. Primarily Java, with some Python alongside it.

• Real-time data. Google Firebase as the database of record, a hierarchical JSON document store with a publish and subscribe model.

• Working databases. Ephemeral PostgreSQL databases spun up per active project and torn down when they’re no longer needed.

• Storage and infrastructure. Google Cloud Storage for files, objects and backups, handled through scripted per-project runs.

You don’t need to have touched every layer here, but strong Java along with modern TypeScript and Angular will set you up well. Beyond that we care most about how you think, how quickly you pick things up, and how well you work with the people around you.

Working with us

This is a New Zealand-based role and you can work remotely from anywhere in the country. Because the client and the wider team are based in the United States, we may explore a shift to your hours a little to keep a healthy daily overlap with the US west coast. We’ll agree the exact pattern together, and we’re not in the business of asking anyone to get up too early.

You’ll be hired into our New Zealand team, with the backing of an established, UK business that has been placing senior engineers with international clients for years.

Interested?

If this sounds like you, we’d love to talk. Send through your CV along with a short note on a product or feature you’re proud of and the part you played in deciding it was the right thing to build.