Senior Automation & AI Engineer

Engineering
Auckland or Christchurch, New Zealand
Full-time

Description

Founded in New Zealand in 2017, Timescapes is a visual progress tracking solution for complex construction projects. Our mission is to simplify construction through shared visibility. Customers love Timescapes because it helps them stay on schedule, validate construction claims and communicate progress more effectively.

We’re a rapidly growing company, and are used by some of the largest construction firms across Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United States.

The Role

We're hiring a hands-on builder to lead AI and data across Timescapes: someone who finds the highest-leverage problems in the business and solves them with agentic AI, automation and better data.

You will work across every team at Timescapes, understand how work actually flows, and then build and streamline the workflows. Some of that is agentic AI but plenty of the time the right answer is a simple automation, fixing the process underneath, or removing a step nobody needed.

This is an individual contributor role. You will scope the work, build it yourself where that is fastest, and bring in vendors or contractors where that makes more sense.

Location: Auckland, New Zealand. Hybrid, in-office.

Reporting to: Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer, moving to the Chief Operating Officer in time.

Scope: Internal-facing, you are improving how Timescapes runs. AI inside our product is owned by a separate team, and building customer-facing AI features is not this job.

Our stack: HubSpot, Odoo, Chargebee, Mixpanel, n8n, Superset, MotherDuck and our own platform, plus the usual assortment of bolt-ons.

What You'll Be Doing

Finding and Framing the Work

• Finding the work: Partner with Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Service Delivery, Field Service, Finance and Product to find where the real friction is, and focus on the problems with genuine payoff. The best opportunities may not necessarily arrive as requests.

• New ways of operating: Track what is newly possible in AI and automation, evaluate the tools worth our attention, and work out what they change about how we run. Some of the biggest wins will be doing something differently, not doing the current thing faster.

• Process before automation: Map how work actually happens to deliver value to our customers, including the undocumented parts, and deeply understand the value flow before automating it.

Building and Shipping

• Build and deploy: Agentic AI workflows, automations and internal tools, particularly ones spanning multiple systems or functions. Measure outcomes, iterate, retire what is not effective.

• Keeping it running: Take ongoing ownership of the systems and automations you build, keeping them reliable and maintainable rather than handing them off and moving on.

• Build versus buy: Manage vendors and contractors where buying beats building, and own those relationships end to end.

• Manage Costs: Keep running costs under control and visible to the teams that use each solution, so they can make an informed call on whether the costs are justified.

Systems and Data

• The stack we have: HubSpot, Odoo, Chargebee, MotherDuck and our own platform. Deep in their APIs and across how they connect. Work out what we are running, what it costs and what should be optimised.

• Entities and trusted numbers: Define what a project is, what a customer is, which system is the source of truth, and keep company reporting trustworthy on top of it.

Capability and Guardrails

• Enablement: Lead by example as the most active AI practitioner in the company. Run sessions, write practical playbooks, upskill teams so the capability spreads beyond you.

• Guardrails and cost: Standards on privacy, security and appropriate use, transparency about where AI is involved, and visible running costs.

What This Role Does Not Own

• You are not intended to be the administrator for our business systems. For example, HubSpot configuration still sits with RevOps, Odoo configuration sits with Operations and their implementation partner. Product analytics sits with Product. You build on top of these systems and ensure information and automation flows between them.

• You will have a strong voice on what we adopt, what we retire and how things connect, plus sign-off on new tools that touch company data.

Success in Your First Twelve Months

• Manual processes across functions are replaced with flows that run themselves, in daily use rather than pilots.

• Our teams spend their time with customers and on site, not chasing, checking and moving information from one place to another.

• The processes themselves are better, not just faster. We fixed them on the way through and the obvious friction points are gone.

• Teams are building and improving flows themselves because you taught them how.

Requirements

Experience & Qualifications

• 5+ years across automation, data, analytics engineering or related roles, with recent and substantial hands-on AI work

• A portfolio of things you have built. We will ask you to walk us through them

• Experience in a fast-moving SaaS or startup environment where you owned outcomes end to end

• Experience scoping and managing external vendors and contractors

• Construction or hardware industry experience is a bonus, not a requirement

• Must have the legal right to live and work in New Zealand

What You'll Bring

You've done this work before and can show it. We care far more about what you've shipped than the exact titles you've held.

• Hands-on AI experience: Current, practical work with AI automation tools. Workflow builders, automation platforms, agent frameworks, and the judgement to know when a simple script beats an agent.

• Strong technical fundamentals: SQL, coding, APIs and scripting, and making systems that were not designed to talk to each other work together. Enough data modelling to define entities properly and define metrics alongside the people who own them.

• A track record of changing how a function works: You go in, understand how the work really happens, and change it.

• Comfort with operational and field teams: Scheduling, dispatch, install workflows and service tickets, not just sales and finance.

• Familiarity with commercial systems: And with the bolt-on sprawl that accumulates around them.

• A practical point of view on responsible AI: Applied, not theoretical.

• Comfort with ambiguity: You hold a company-wide view while executing in the detail, and when there is no playbook, you write it.

• An enabler's instinct: You do not hoard knowledge, you multiply it, including with people who are sceptical or overwhelmed by AI.

• Strong communication: In writing and in person, comfortable with everyone from engineers to finance to sales.

Benefits

We're at an exciting growth stage where your decisions will directly impact our trajectory as we scale globally.

We offer:

Competitive compensation package

Enhanced Parental Leave offering

EAP support

Our Values

Customer value comes first

Our ability to succeed as a business is directly connected to the value we deliver to customers. To create value for them, we need to first understand them really well.

Act with intent

Great outcomes aren't achieved by accident, but rather through thoughtful and deliberate action. We think critically, and everything that we do, we do for a reason.

1% better every day

While reliability is important, it can also make us complacent. Relentless and rapid improvement is essential if we want to earn the right to keep growing our business. What seems like a small improvement each day compounds over time.

Simple, but not easy

We always strive to achieve simplicity, whether in the solutions we create for customers, the processes we build, or our communications within the company. However, we don't shy away from complexity, and we accept that achieving simplicity requires intense effort.

Life at Timescapes

Our team tells us what they value most: the people, the product, the trust, and the opportunity to do work that actually matters. We have built that culture deliberately and we look for it in every hire we make.

If you are looking for a place where your work ships into the real world, where the team is small enough that your contributions matter, and where the mission is clear, we would love to hear from you.