Exciting New Opportunity as Principal Engineer, AI Platform at CTM!

About CTM

CTM is a global award-winning provider of innovative and cost-effective travel management solutions to the corporate, events, leisure and loyalty travel markets. CTM provides personalised service excellence with client-facing technology solutions in offices all around the world, including New Zealand, Australia, Asia, North America and Europe with over 3000 employees. At CTM, our people are our greatest asset. We are a team of collaborative, innovative and future focused professionals we work with the company's values in mind; Connect, Deliver and Evolve.

About the Role

CTM is building the intelligence infrastructure that will underpin AI-powered capabilities across its global travel platform. We are looking for a Principal Engineer, AI Platform to lead that effort.

This is a senior technical leadership role with real organisational scope. You will lead the CTM Intelligence Pillar, spanning an AI/ML platform team and an experimental conversational AI team, and own the technical direction of CTM's shared AI/ML platform: the governed, self-service infrastructure that other engineering teams build on top of.

The team you are joining has strong technical foundations, and the work already in flight reflects genuine engineering rigor. The priority now is accelerating delivery and getting the broader organisation building on top of what exists.

Equally important is the organisational dimension. CTM is moving toward a model where every engineering team can ship intelligent features through governed, self-service platform capabilities. You will shape how that happens, leading the internal AI Guild and working across the engineering organisation to establish what the platform provides and how teams consume it.

About You

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 5 years in senior or principal roles
• Demonstrated experience managing and mentoring domain or team-level tech leads in a scaled engineering organisation
• A track record of applying AI/ML in production systems, with the judgment to know where it belongs and where it does not
• Experience working within or alongside internal developer platform models, with a clear understanding of self-service principles and how to apply them to AI/ML capability
• Strong architectural judgment across distributed systems, APIs, and data infrastructure
• Building scalable retrieval systems (Vector DBs) across fragmented legacy data.
• Proven ability to communicate technical strategy to non-technical stakeholders including at executive level, without losing precision
• Implementing automated CI/CD for model testing, versioning, and deployment.
• Demonstrable experience with: TypeScript, NestJS, PostgreSQL, Prisma, RabbitMQ, direct integration of LLM provider APIs (Azure AI Foundry, OpenAI, or equivalent) in production systems, and strong knowledge of vector stores/RAG and graph databases such as Neo4j,
• Experience driving organisational change where the goal was shifting how teams think and work, not just delivering a project
• Hands-on experience with multi-agent frameworks to move beyond simple chatbots toward autonomous business process automation.
• Implementing real-time safety, PII redaction, and hallucination checks.
• Comfortable operating in an environment where not everything is defined yet and some of the hardest problems are political as much as technical
• Bachelor's degree or above in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience

Why CTM?

As a global organisation CTM offers a range of employee benefits that including;

• Travel discounts
• Perkbox - Retail, Lifestyle, Entertainment, Health & Wellness discounts
• Training and Development opportunities - online lessons and certificates
• Annual Volunteer Day
• x2 Wellness/Chillout Days
• Blended work arrangements with hybrid WFH flexibility
• 2 Weeks extra leave - Purchase Leave
• Paid Parental Leave
• Sonder - EAP Platform

CTM offer a strong, established and sustainable work environment which will support your career development and wellbeing. CTM is committed to the unique contributions of all our people and actively encourage candidates with all abilities and diverse backgrounds to apply.

Come work for a global award winning company that values its people, community, and technological innovation.