Lead AI Engineer - GenAI, LLMs & Agentic Systems

About the role

A technology-driven Australian business is looking for a Lead AI Engineer to take ownership of its growing AI capability. The role suits a hands-on engineer who enjoys solving real-world problems, experimenting with emerging technologies and turning AI concepts into production-ready solutions. It offers significant autonomy to shape the technical direction and build intelligent products that deliver business and customer value. The position is based in Sydney CBD with a hybrid arrangement of three days in the office and two days working from home.

Key responsibilities

• Lead the design, development and deployment of production-grade AI/LLM solutions.
• Build and optimise solutions using LLMs, RAG, agentic workflows, tool use and fine-tuning.
• Develop evaluation frameworks to measure model quality, accuracy, reliability and performance.
• Experiment with different models, including open-source and proprietary LLMs.
• Own the end-to-end AI engineering lifecycle, from experimentation and prototyping to production.
• Set engineering best practices for model evaluation, monitoring, safety and scalability.
• Work with product and engineering stakeholders to turn business challenges into practical AI solutions.
• Help shape the organisation's long-term applied AI capability and technical direction.

Required profile

• Strong hands-on experience building and deploying AI/ML or LLM-powered solutions into production.
• Deep understanding of Generative AI, including LLMs, RAG, embeddings, agents and model evaluation.
• Experience with fine-tuning, post-training or other model optimisation techniques.
• Ability to design evaluation methodologies, set benchmarks and improve model performance.
• Experience making technical decisions on model selection, quality, latency, cost and scalability.
• Comfortable working independently in a fast-moving environment; a current Lead title is not required, and strong Senior AI Engineers are welcome.

Required skills

• Strong Python and software engineering fundamentals.
• Generative AI, LLMs, RAG, embeddings and agent workflows.

What we offer

• Salary up to $160k plus superannuation and equity.
• Flexible working: three days in the Sydney CBD office, two days from home.