AI programmer/ Engineer

Trellis Data; South Canberra; Hybrid; AUD 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Job summary

Trellis Data is seeking a talented Engineer with practical DevOps experience to join our growing technology team. You will design, build and deploy AI-powered products, combining software automation with hands-on hardware work in a genuinely hybrid role in Australia.

You will work with the CTO and Engineering Manager to ensure scalable, secure and production-ready infrastructure across cloud and on-prem environments. Strong Python, AI/ML familiarity and a practical, curious mindset are essential.

Qualifications

• Experience delivering production-grade software and APIs.
• Hands-on AI/ML infrastructure exposure.
• Strong Python programming.
• Experience with CI/CD and cloud deployments.
• Familiarity with security-focused development (ISO 27001 awareness).

Responsibilities

• Design, build and maintain AI-powered applications and features
• Integrate large language models and ML services into our products
• Develop reliable APIs, backend services and data pipelines
• Work with prompt engineering and AI agents
• Evaluate AI outputs for accuracy, reliability, security and performance
• Deploy and manage applications in cloud environments
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines and deployment workflows
• Use containers and infrastructure-as-code to create consistent environments
• Monitor system health, investigate issues and improve application performance
• Collaborate with product and engineering to deliver production-ready solutions
• Contribute to technical decisions, documentation and development standards
• Build and maintain infrastructure-as-code for provisioning and configuration
• Operate Docker Swarm orchestration
• Contribute to storage architecture and capacity planning (ZFS, NVMe, MinIO)
• Write Python/Bash/Go scripts to automate infra tasks
• Support monitoring, alerting, and observability for infra health
• Assist with CI/CD pipeline infrastructure and deployment tooling
• Rack, cable, and configure servers, storage arrays, and GPU hardware
• Physically install, remove, and shuck drives; handle component-level hardware work
• Move and relocate hardware between racks, rooms, or sites as needed
• Diagnose hardware faults and coordinate with vendors on RMAs and repairs
• Follow physical security procedures for ISO 27001 environments
• serving government and defence customers

Job description

TrellisData is a fast-growing Australian sovereign-AI leader that powers high-security organisations across defence, logistics and law-enforcement. Our productAgentaus(Agentaus.com.au) is Australia's AI capability leading the country and the region in AI Chat, Agents, and API connectivity. Our mission is to deliver world-leading AI that is trusted and safe for our customers. We champion a culture of curiosity, collaboration and rapid impact, where every voice can shape the future of secure AI.

About the role

We are looking for a talented Engineer with practical DevOps experience to join our growing technology team.

You will help design, build and deploy AI-powered products that solve meaningful, real-world problems. This is a hands-on role covering the full development lifecycle—from experimenting with AI models and building production-ready applications to deploying, monitoring and improving them in the cloud.

The ideal candidate is a strong programmer who understands modern AI technologies and is also comfortable working with cloud infrastructure, automated deployments and production systems.

You will help us plan, build, and maintain the physical and virtual infrastructure underpinning our platforms. This is a genuinely hybrid role: half the job is software - automation, capacity planning, monitoring, infrastructure-as-code - and half is hands-on - racking servers, shucking drives, installing GPUs, and physically moving hardware between racks and sites. If you like the idea of writing the Terraform that provisions a storage pool and then also being the person who walks over, opens the chassis, and swaps the drive in, this role is for you. You'll work closely with the CTO (and, as the team grows, an Engineering Manager) to keep our compute, storage, and networking infrastructure reliable, secure, and ready to scale.

Key responsibilities

• Design, build and maintain AI-powered applications and features
• Integrate large language models and other machine-learning services into our products
• Develop reliable APIs, backend services and data-processing pipelines
• Work with prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation and AI agents
• Evaluate AI outputs for accuracy, reliability, security and performance
• Deploy and manage applications in cloud environments
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines and deployment workflows
• Use containers and infrastructure-as-code to create consistent environments
• Monitor system health, investigate issues and improve application performance
• Work closely with product, engineering and leadership teams to turn ideas into production-ready solutions
• Contribute to technical decisions, documentation and development standards
• Build and maintain infrastructure-as-code for provisioning and configuration
• Operate and improve our container orchestration environment (Docker Swarm)
• Contribute to storage architecture and capacity planning (ZFS, NVMe pools, MinIO, forecasting growth)
• Write scripts and tooling (Python/Bash/Go) to automate infrastructure tasks
• Support monitoring, alerting, and observability for infrastructure health
• Assist with CI/CD pipeline infrastructure and deployment tooling
• Rack, cable, and configure servers, storage arrays, and GPU hardware
• Physically install, remove, and shuck drives; handle component-level hardware work
• Move and relocate hardware between racks, rooms, or sites as needed
• Diagnose hardware faults and coordinate with vendors on RMAs and repairs
• Follow physical security and handling procedures appropriate to an ISO 27001-certified environment
• serving government and defence customers

Nice to have

• Exposure to Proxmox/ESXi virtualisation
• Familiarity with Tailscale or other zero-trust networking
• Interest in AI/ML infrastructure (GPU inference stacks, vLLM, etc.)
• Exposure to compliance-driven environments (ISO 27001, PSPF, or similar)
• Home lab or personal infrastructure projects - we love to see this

What we're looking for

• Strong programming skills in Python
• Experience developing production software, APIs or backend services
• Practical experience working with generative AI, machine learning or large language models
• Familiarity with leading AI platforms, APIs and open-source models
• Working knowledge of Docker, Code version control and CI/CD tools
• Understanding of secure software development, testing and monitoring
• Strong problem-solving skills and attention to detail
• The ability to communicate technical ideas clearly and work collaboratively
• A practical, curious mindset and enthusiasm for learning new technologies

Highly regarded

• Experience with container orchestration platforms
• Experience with vector databases, embeddings and retrieval-augmented generation
• Experience with AIOps, model evaluation or model-monitoring practices
• Experience building secure applications for government, defence and/or high security industries
• Knowledge of data engineering, cybersecurity or scalable cloud architecture