Senior Manager - AI & Data Engineering
Want to be a part of Asia Pacific & Japan’s (APJ) largest, most innovative, and rapidly growing data centre company?
AirTrunk is a technology company with a powerful purpose - to scale and sustain the relentless growth of the region’s digital future. We do this by continuously redefining and delivering hyperscale data centres that meet the needs of our customers - the world’s most transformational companies. And we’re doing so sustainably, for today and tomorrow.
Having opened Australia’s first and largest hyperscale data centres in 2017, we set our eyes on rapid expansion and now operate a platform of hyperscale data centres across the APJ region. With backing from our investors, including Blackstone, this is just the beginning…
Come join the A-Team at AirTrunk, where the cloud meets the ground.
A Snapshot
As Senior Manager - AI & Data at AirTrunk, you will lead a multidisciplinary team delivering software products, AI capabilities, and trusted data solutions that solve high-value business problems. You will work with business leaders to define the problem, desired outcomes, priority features, and measurable benefits, then guide delivery from discovery and design through release and ongoing operation. The role combines people leadership, product delivery, and technical stewardship across modern software engineering, applied AI, and data engineering on Databricks. You will create clarity across competing priorities, build strong delivery practices, and ensure the team produces secure, reliable, and scalable capabilities that improve how AirTrunk operates and makes decisions.
Your Day to Day
Business Partnership & Value Delivery
- Partner with business leaders and users to understand the underlying problem, operating context, desired outcomes, and constraints before committing to a solution.
- Shape and maintain a prioritised roadmap of initiatives and features, balancing customer value, strategic alignment, delivery risk, technical feasibility, and team capacity.
- Define benefit hypotheses, success measures, and adoption plans; track whether delivered capabilities achieve the intended operational, financial, risk, or customer outcomes.
- Provide clear, evidence-based advice on options, trade-offs, dependencies, progress, and decisions to senior stakeholders and governance forums.
Team Leadership & Delivery
- Lead, coach, and develop a multidisciplinary team spanning software, AI, and data engineering, setting clear accountabilities and fostering an inclusive, high-performing culture.
- Own end-to-end delivery from discovery and planning through build, testing, release, adoption, and support, with visible milestones, dependencies, risks, and quality controls.
- Establish pragmatic product and agile delivery practices that enable fast feedback, disciplined prioritisation, and reliable execution across multiple initiatives.
- Plan team capacity and capability, remove delivery blockers, and coordinate internal specialists, delivery partners, and vendors where required.
AI & Software Product Delivery
- Guide the design and delivery of secure, production-ready software products, AI-enabled applications, automation, and agentic workflows that address validated business needs.
- Translate business outcomes into coherent product features, user stories, acceptance criteria, release plans, and feedback loops that keep users engaged throughout delivery.
- Ensure sound software engineering practices across architecture, APIs, integration, testing, code review, CI/CD, cloud deployment, security, and maintainability.
- Oversee AI evaluation, human oversight, responsible-use controls, monitoring, and lifecycle management so solutions remain accurate, safe, useful, and cost-effective.
Data Engineering & Databricks
- Be accountable for reliable data pipelines, reusable data products, and governed datasets on Databricks that support operational applications, analytics, and AI use cases.
- Provide technical direction across lakehouse architecture, batch and streaming ingestion, SQL and Python engineering, dbt transformations, modelling, and enterprise integration.
- Champion data quality, lineage, observability, access control, privacy, and governance so teams and business users can trust and safely use delivered data.
- Stay sufficiently hands-on to review designs and code, challenge technical decisions, support incident resolution, and guide the team through complex engineering problems.
Governance, Operations & Stakeholder Leadership
- Establish fit-for-purpose delivery governance covering scope, architecture, risk, change, release readiness, benefits, and operational ownership without creating unnecessary overhead.
- Work closely with Enterprise Architecture, Cyber Security, Data Governance, Technology, and business teams to align solutions with organisational standards and target platforms.
- Ensure production services have clear ownership, support models, service objectives, monitoring, incident practices, lifecycle plans, and transparent run costs.
- Build trusted relationships across AirTrunk, communicate effectively with technical and non-technical audiences, and create shared accountability for outcomes and adoption.
Requirements
- Significant experience delivering software, data, and AI capabilities in complex organisations, including several years leading technical teams and concurrent initiatives.
- Proven people leadership, with experience setting direction, coaching engineers, building capability, managing performance, and creating an inclusive team environment.
- A strong track record of taking ambiguous business problems through discovery, prioritisation, delivery, adoption, and measurable benefit realisation.
- Strong product and delivery management skills, including roadmaps, feature prioritisation, agile ways of working, dependency management, risk management, and stakeholder governance.
- Broad software engineering knowledge across cloud-native applications, APIs, integration, automated testing, CI/CD, security, reliability, and support.
- Practical data engineering and Databricks knowledge, including lakebase, lakehouse patterns, pipelines, SQL, Python, dbt, modelling, and governance.
- Working knowledge of applied AI and ML, including LLM solutions, evaluation, observability, responsible AI, human oversight, and production lifecycle.
- Ability to engage deeply in technical design and code reviews while delegating effectively and keeping the team focused on business outcomes.
- Excellent communication and influencing skills, able to explain trade-offs and align executives, business teams, and technical specialists.
- Experience with capacity planning, commercial and vendor management, budgeting, and balancing delivery commitments across a portfolio of initiatives.
- Strong judgement, structured problem-solving, and comfort operating through ambiguity, changing priorities, and a fast-paced delivery environment.
- A relevant degree or equivalent practical experience in software engineering, data, AI, computer science, or a related discipline.
The AirTrunk Culture
Working at AirTrunk is a once in a lifetime opportunity to fast-track your career and amplify your impact. Whilst you’re helping scale our region’s digital future, we’ll help you Grow@Hyperscale and unleash your full potential.
The pace in which we operate means you’ll feel an electric atmosphere at AirTrunk. We are a team of challengers and collaborative problem solvers who break new ground every day. We do this by living our values, going above and beyond, and being dynamic, transparent, and responsive.
Every AirTrunker brings their own unique background and diverse perspective to find solutions to problems that matter. We make sure you have everything you need to make your mark and thrive in a flexible and safe working environment, where everyone feels welcome. Our benefits empower AirTrunkers to stay positively charged.
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EEO Statement
The Company is an equal opportunity employer. In accordance with applicable law, we prohibit discrimination against any applicant, employee, or other covered person based on any legally recognized basis, including, but not limited to: veteran status, uniformed servicemember status, race, color, caste, immigration status, religion, religious creed (including religious dress and grooming practices), sex, gender, gender expression, gender identity, marital status, sexual orientation, pregnancy (including childbirth, lactation or related medical conditions), age, national origin or ancestry, citizenship, physical or mental disability, genetic information (including testing and characteristics), protected leave status, domestic violence victim status, or any other consideration protected by federal, state or local law. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations, if you need an accommodation to complete the application process, please email [email protected]