Principal Consultant - Data and AI

We're hiring a Principal Consultant - Data and AI on a Permanent, Full-time basis, based in Auckland or Christchurch (Hybrid).

The Role

Enterprise AI is no longer a future ambition - it is happening now, and the organisations that get it right are the ones with the right people shaping it.

We are looking for a Principal Consultant - Data and AI to join our growing consultancy and help leading organisations navigate one of the most consequential shifts in enterprise technology. This is not a role for someone who wants to maintain the status quo. It is for someone who wants to define what comes next.

You will work at the intersection of data strategy, modern architecture, and AI enablement, guiding clients from ambition to execution, and from experimentation to scale. You will be the person in the room who can translate complexity into clarity, challenge thinking at the executive level, and still roll up your sleeves to build and deploy the solution.

Key Responsibilities

You Will Have The Following Primary Responsibilities

• Shape AI-ready enterprises. Lead strategic engagements that help clients define and deliver data and AI roadmaps, from the foundations that make AI trustworthy, to the agentic architectures that make it transformative.
• Lead pre-sales and solution design. Bring technical credibility and strategic depth to client conversations. You will shape proposals, respond to complex RFPs, author statements of work, and help prospective clients understand what is genuinely possible and what it takes to get there.
• Architect modern data platforms. Design and deliver scalable, governed data platforms across MS Fabric, Databricks, Snowflake, and beyond. You know the tradeoffs, you have made the calls, and you can defend them in front of an engineering team and a CFO alike.
• Drive client relationships. Build trusted advisor relationships with business and technical stakeholders. You are as comfortable engaging in conversation with senior client stakeholders about AI strategy as you are reviewing a data model with a senior engineer.
• Govern and quality-assure. Architect solutions to industry standards. You understand that the foundations (lineage, quality, security, access control) are what separate AI that works from AI that creates risk.
• Mentor and uplift. Coach mid-level consultants, share what you know, and invest in the capability of the team around you.
• Stay ahead. The data and AI landscape is moving faster than at any point in its history. You track it, you synthesise it, and you bring informed perspectives to clients and colleagues.

About You

You’re a confident, collaborative, innovative, and have held senior consulting or delivery roles. You have a can-do attitude, flexible in your approach, and are comfortable working in dynamic, fast-paced environments and solving complex challenges. You bring deep technical knowledge, drive client engagements, have a willingness to learn and share, and a genuine interest in delivering better solutions and value-add for our clients.

Required Skills & Experience

The ideal candidate will have the following skills and experience:

• 15+ years in data consulting, architecture, or advanced analytics roles
• Deep hands-on experience delivering cloud data platforms e.g. Azure, AWS, Snowflake, Databricks, MS Fabric, BigQuery, or similar
• Hands-on experience with Agentic AI solutions, AI/ML data pipelines, or real-time streaming architectures
• Proven pre-sales capability, including proposal responses, commercial shaping, client discovery, and the ability to translate a client's ambition into a credible, costed engagement
• Experience with data transformation and orchestration tooling e.g. dbt, Coalesce, Apache Airflow, Prefect
• Strong AI and ML enablement experience i.e. understanding how data architecture decisions upstream determine AI outcomes downstream
• Expertise across data strategy, governance, architecture, modelling, and engineering
• The ability to move fluently between executive stakeholders and engineering teams without losing credibility in either room
• A Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Data Science, or a related field
• Relevant certifications across cloud platforms, tools, and methodologies e.g. Databricks, Snowflake, MS Fabric, Data Modelling, PRINCE2, Agile, DAMA
• People leadership experience.

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