Senior Agentic Teacher

• Bring serious agentic AI depth to New Zealand's first programme training developers in this field
• Mentor junior developers to grow rapidly across a two-week intensive and six-week delivery cycle
• Fixed term, flexible — structured around our first cohort (July 2026)

About Dev Academy Aotearoa

Dev Academy has been running New Zealand's premier developer bootcamp for over 10 years. We take pride in graduating capable students who love our programme and change their lives with careers in tech. More broadly, we are a social enterprise working for a better, kinder and more diverse tech sector. Our core values are integrity, kindness, and effort.

The Agentic Launchpad

The Agentic Launchpad is our new programme — a 16-week, NZQA Level 6 qualification that trains developers to build real things using agentic AI workflows. Learners work on real projects, with real clients, supervised by a small team of practitioners who are already doing this work.

The programme is built around two modules. Each module starts with a two-week intensive led by our programme lead Joshua Vial, followed by a six-week project cycle. The project cycle is where this role lives.

This role

We're looking for a Senior Agentic Teacher who brings genuine technical depth to the room. You'll work alongside Joshua Vial (programme lead) and an Intermediate Agentic Teacher as a three-person delivery team.

You've built solutions and products with fully agentic systes. You've shipped things with agent loops, tool use, and LLM orchestration. You have opinions about what good looks like, and you can articulate them in a way that helps people grow. Now you're ready to bring that into a teaching context, because you want to help others get there faster.

The programme is fully remote. During project cycle you'll be acting as technical lead across multiple learner teams working on different projects simultaneously, reviewing work, maintaining quality standards, and unblocking problems, while working with the rest of your team.

This is a fixed term role for the first 8-week module in Agentic Launchpad — approximately 8 weeks at 30 hours per week, plus onboarding and wrap weeks. Cohort 1 begins 27 July 2026.

Key responsibilities

• Act as technical lead for learner project teams across both project cycles
• Conduct regular code reviews, set the bar, give specific feedback, model what good looks like
• Help learners develop judgment about when and how to apply AI assistance effectively
• Unblock technical problems; guide architecture decisions; maintain codebase quality across projects
• Build in-house production level codebases and solution scopes
• Contribute to assessment marking, particularly technical assessments
• Run technical workshops and deep-dives within the project modules as needed

What we need

• Minimum 4 years professional software development experience across multiple technologies or stacks: breadth is valued over depth in a single stack
• A deep and evolving agentic practice: you've tried multiple tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and others), moved away from things as better options emerged, and your current practice is at the edge, not the centre
• Hands-on experience building agentic AI systems: tool use, agent loops, multi-step reasoning, LLM APIs or orchestration frameworks
• A track record of mentoring junior developers: you've been the go-to person for at least one junior, you know what that support looks like, and you've learned from it
• Experience conducting code reviews and providing technical feedback to less experienced developers
• Ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly and make them accessible to learners at different levels
• Experience managing client or stakeholder relationships in a project delivery context

It would be great, but not necessary, for you to have:

• Experience across C#, Azure, AWS, or DevOps
• Experience in a bootcamp, accelerator, ITO, or non-traditional education environment

You might fit the bill if

• You've built solutions agentically, not just used AI tools, and you have real opinions about what works and what doesn't
• You can meet a learner where they are, regardless of your own technical seniority — you've set your ego aside and it shows
• You're energised by the idea of helping someone else develop technical judgment, not just technical skill
• You know how to maintain technical quality across distributed teams — you can review work, set standards, and keep projects on track without being in the room
• You're comfortable operating in a new and evolving environment — the programme, the tools, and the delivery model are all changing
• You have strong integrity and can give and receive feedback with grace
• You've engaged with te ao Maori, tikanga Maori, te reo Maori or Te Tiriti o Waitangi
• You are able to embed and promote equity and inclusion through your actions and words
• You're into Dev Academy's social mission: a better, kinder, more diverse tech sector

We offer

• The chance to be the technical anchor for one of the most forward-looking developer programmes in New Zealand
• A small, high-trust team where your contribution directly shapes the programme
• A work environment that is authentic, human-centric, and takes technical excellence seriously
• The opportunity to grow into future cohorts as the programme expands

Other information

This is a fixed term employment arrangement aligned to our cohort delivery dates. You'll receive a salary of $150,000–$200,000 per annum, plus holiday pay and KiwiSaver, over that term. There is no pathway to a permanent role after the Launchpad, but there may be an opportunity to join the Launchpad delivery team again in early 2027.

We welcome applications from people with non-traditional experience and from minority backgrounds and genders. Dev Academy has a commitment to Te Tiriti o Waitangi. If you'd like to bring along whanau to speak on your behalf, we'd love to welcome you all.

If you're on the fence, please apply — even if you don't tick every box.

We're reviewing applications on a rolling basis — if you're interested, apply as soon as you're ready rather than waiting.

Please send your CV to jack.tolley@devacademy.co.nz and let us know the following:

1. Tell us about your agentic practice and how it's evolved over time. Feel free to go into detail — what have you tried, what have you moved away from, and what does your current practice look like?
2. What is your experience mentoring junior developers? Tell us about the juniors you've supported — how many, at what stage of their careers, and what you learned.
3. How do you connect with our values: Kindness, Integrity and Effort?
4. Why are you applying for the Agentic Launchpad role?