AI Engineering Manager: Lead Production ML & Cloud Systems

Nine; North Sydney Council; Hybrid; AUD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

18 weeks paid parental leave

Employee Exclusives program

Digital newspaper subscription

Stan subscription

Job summary

Nine is Australia’s largest locally owned media company, with a Data Science & AI team building AI-powered products for Nine’s brands. As Engineering Manager, AI, you will lead the AI Engineering function across GCP/AWS, guide AI product collaboration, and ensure robust, scalable software shipped to production.

You will mentor a high-performing ML/AI team, set engineering standards, and own the architecture for end-to-end AI systems, balancing modern tooling with reliable, maintainable code.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of commercial software engineering experience with a track record shipping and operating production systems.
• 3+ years in technical leadership or engineering management with mentoring/people-growth experience.
• Strong programming skills in Python; Go familiarity is a plus.
• Experience designing and building backend systems and APIs with solid software-architecture grounding.
• Hands-on experience with GCP and/or AWS cloud platforms.
• Proficiency with CI/CD pipelines and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform or OpenTofu).
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience building applications with LLMs, agentic AI frameworks, RAG, vector databases, or embedding models.
• Exposure to Google Cloud AI services (Vertex AI) and MLOps or multi-modal AI systems.
• Containerisation and orchestration with Docker and Kubernetes (EKS or GKE).
• Prior experience in a media, publishing, or digital content organisation.

Responsibilities

• Mentor and grow a high-performing ML/AI engineering team with a culture of craft, cross-skilling and learning.
• Set benchmarks for software quality via clean architecture, CI/CD, testing and design sessions.
• Own the technical architecture for AI-powered systems across GCP and AWS, balancing speed with long-term scalability.
• Maintain operational stability, monitoring, and incident management for production AI applications.
• Optimize Agile/Scrum workflows, remove blockers, and keep delivering high-quality software.

Skills

Python

Go

Backend APIs

CI/CD

Kubernetes

Terraform

GCP

AWS

MLOps

Media experience

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Software Engineering

Tools

Docker

Git

Vertex AI

Job description

Nine is Australia’s largest locally owned media company, with a Data Science & AI team building AI-powered products for Nine’s brands. As Engineering Manager, AI, you will lead the AI Engineering function across GCP/AWS, guide AI product collaboration, and ensure robust, scalable software shipped to production.

You will mentor a high-performing ML/AI team, set engineering standards, and own the architecture for end-to-end AI systems, balancing modern tooling with reliable, maintainable code.