Agentic [AI] Product Engineer / Builder

Why Runway

Many of New Zealand’s small and medium businesses are growing and hiring, but struggle to get funding on fair terms. Traditional lenders find it hard to assess a business that doesn’t fit a standard mould. They treat anything complicated as risky, and price it for the worst case.

Runway is a non-bank lender that looks at how a business actually works. We use technology to find a better offer: the right amount, on the right terms, at a rate that reflects the real risk. We’re a well-funded start-up, and we’ve already lent money to real New Zealand businesses. Every loan helps us make better decisions. Our software is brand new, so you’ll build on a clean foundation instead of fixing someone else’s.

Why this role

The title has two names because the work covers both, and neither name describes it on its own. Our team is small and covers a lot of ground, so your work won’t stay in one discipline. You’ll be close enough to the business to see which problems matter, and you’ll have room to tackle them.

We build with the latest AI models and agent tools, and we expect the way we work to keep changing. You’ll help work out what works best, alongside people who care about the same thing. You’ll start with what you’re already good at, and keep taking on things you haven’t done before. That’s normal here.

This listing covers multiple roles across a range of levels. We’re not looking for several copies of the same person. We want people whose strengths complement each other, and we’ll work out the right mix as we meet people.

What you’ll do

• Understand what users and the business need.
• Turn that into a piece of work that’s the right size to deliver.
• Prototype or build it.
• Check that it works and behaves as it should.
• Ask a specialist to review it when needed.
• Watch what happens, and use what you learn next time.

The work could be something customers use online, an internal tool for our team, a link to another company’s system, analysis that pulls data from several places, the infrastructure our services and agents run on, or a better way to deliver with agents.

What we’re looking for

• Useful work you’ve done and can explain.
• Evidence that you’ve used agentic tools to get a real result, and checked what they produced.
• You learn from feedback.
• Good judgement when things are uncertain.
• You’re happy to pick up whatever the problem needs, even outside what you know today. We’ll always be a small team.
• The right to work in New Zealand: you’re a New Zealand citizen or resident, or you hold a current NZ work visa. We don’t sponsor visas.

If you’ve used agentic coding tools such as Claude Code, Codex or Cursor, and you understand evals, context engineering, human-in-the-loop design, MCP and multi-agent orchestration, we’d like to talk.

You might come from technical product management, software development, platform or reliability engineering, or data and analysis. You might already lead an engineering team and still ship most weeks, directing agents rather than writing every line yourself. We welcome, and need, people with different strengths.

How we think about experience

We welcome applications at every level: junior, intermediate and senior. We don’t hire for a job title or a set number of years. What counts is what you’ve actually done: work you did yourself rather than watched from nearby, experience across more than one discipline, and a record of taking on things you hadn’t done before. Your scope and responsibilities will reflect what you can show us, not what your last role was called.

If you’re early in your career, you don’t need a long CV. Show us what you’ve built, how you checked it and how you learn. That matters more to us than how long you’ve been working.

We also welcome experienced engineering leads. If you’ve led teams and kept building, that experience counts in your favour. Setting direction, reviewing work and helping people grow are exactly what a small team needs. We just ask that you’re still hands-on with the tools: directing agents, reading what they produce and deciding what ships. Here you’ll lead by building, not from a distance.

What we offer

• A strong market salary, based on your skills and experience.
• Hybrid working from our office in Newmarket, Auckland.
• A real say in shaping the work.
• Proper development hardware, and the agentic tools you need to get things done.
• The chance to learn alongside experienced colleagues. We’re working out together how to run agents at scale, so bring what you’ve learned.

How we hire for this role

1. Apply below. It takes about 25 minutes: your CV, a cover letter and five questions about your work.
2. A short chat about what motivates you, and anything you want to know about us. We only go on to the next stages if it looks like a good fit on both sides.
3. A conversation about your work history. No preparation needed.
4. A live work sample, capped at a few hours. You build it with agents, working the way you prefer.
5. A 45-minute review of your sample together. We’ll make changes as we go and see how you think.
6. Your turn: time set aside for your questions.
7. Meet the team.
8. References, then our decision, with feedback.

You’re welcome to use AI at every stage. We care about how well you understand the work and how you checked it, not whether AI helped write the words. We’ll let you know our decision after each stage.

If you have a question about the role, or need any help or adjustments to apply, email careers@runway.co.nz.