Senior Director, Technology Operations (AI/ML)

Location: Christchurch, New Zealand. Office-based role requiring attendance at the hirify.global office three days per week. Flexibility in working hours may be required across different time zones; occasional Tier 3 after-hours support may be needed.

Company

hirify.global develops technology for Earth sciences, helping organisations make better decisions about resources, infrastructure, renewable energy, and environmental impact.

What you will do

• Own the Technology Operations roadmap across reliability, security, resilience, compliance, and cost management.
• Build and operate shared cloud foundations, runtime platforms, CI/CD systems, developer tooling, observability, HPC infrastructure, and AI/ML development environments.
• Establish and lead the application security programme, including secure development practices, threat modelling, SAST/DAST, software composition analysis, and vulnerability remediation.
• Define SLOs, SLAs, operational readiness standards, incident response practices, and continuous improvement processes.
• Partner with Engineering, Product, Security, Legal, and customer-facing teams on audits, compliance, customer due diligence, and security controls.
• Lead organisational design, hiring, coaching, performance management, budgeting, FinOps, and the growth of the Technology Operations organisation.

Requirements

• At least 10 years of experience in software engineering leadership, preferably across infrastructure, SRE, platform operations, or application security.
• Experience operating shared technology platforms, cloud foundations, CI/CD, observability, engineering tooling, and FinOps programmes.
• Strong practical expertise in secure platform engineering, DevSecOps, infrastructure as code, application security testing, and vulnerability management.
• Experience supporting formal security, privacy, assurance, compliance, and external audit requirements.
• Strong understanding of reliability engineering, SLOs/SLAs, incident response, operational metrics, and resilience improvement.
• Tertiary qualification in Software Engineering or a related scientific discipline, plus executive stakeholder management and people leadership experience.

Culture & Benefits

• Collaborative, inclusive culture focused on innovation, ownership, customer impact, and continuous improvement.
• Flexible working arrangements within the requirements of the office-based role and global time-zone collaboration.
• Competitive salary and location-specific benefits.
• Paid volunteer day, employee share purchase plan in most locations, rewards and recognition programme, and continuous learning opportunities.
• Culture, wellbeing, personal support resources, and regular office and engagement events.

Hiring process

• Applications are submitted through the hirify.global careers process.