AI Staff Engineer

Hydrogen Group; Sydney; On-site; AUD 160,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Hydrogen Group is seeking an AI/ML Staff Engineer in Sydney on a 6 month rolling contract to lead the design of complex software systems. The role blends hands-on engineering with leadership, mentoring junior developers and raising the team's capability and productivity.

You will architect strategy, drive end-to-end delivery, and collaborate with product managers, designers, and architects to translate business requirements into exceptional digital experiences while advancing engineering

Qualifications

• Experience designing complex software systems with a focus on resilience, security, and scalability.
• Proven track record leading technical delivery from design to production.
• Ability to mentor engineers and foster knowledge sharing.
• Collaborate with product managers, designers and architects to align tech with product goals.
• Champion engineering practices and adoption of emerging technologies to improve team effectiveness.

Responsibilities

• Lead architectural strategy and tangible system designs for complex projects.
• Drive end-to-end development and ensure alignment with business needs and best practices.
• Mentor engineers and foster a collaborative squad culture across partners.
• Work with cross-functional teams to translate requirements into digital experiences.
• Advance engineering practices and scalable, cost-efficient systems.

Skills

Architectural Strategy & Vision

Technical Leadership

Mentorship & Collaboration

Cross-Functional Partnership

Engineering Excellence & Innovation

Agentic Architecture & Control

Tooling & API Design

State & Context Engineering

Eval-Driven Development

Observability & Tracing

HITL & Safety

Tech Leadership & Pragmatism

Tools

LangSmith

OpenTelemetry

Docker

Job description

We're currently looking for an AI/ML Staff Engineer to join our financial services client in Sydney on a 6 month, rolling contract to lead the design of complex software systems

The role will encompass both hands-on engineering & leadership; you will lead technical delivery from initial system design through to development and production, while mentoring more junior devs and enhancing the team’s overall capability and productivity.

Key Responsibilities

• Architectural Strategy & Vision: Lead the design of complex software systems, advocating for a \"target state\" architecture that prioritizes resilience, security, scalability, and cost-effectiveness across the domain.


• Technical Leadership & Execution: Drive the end-to-end development of innovative solutions to address complex technical challenges, ensuring all implementations align with business needs and engineering best practices.


• Mentorship & Collaborative Culture: Provide high-level technical guidance and mentorship to engineers, fostering a culture of knowledge sharing and collaboration within your squad and across upstream/downstream partners.


• Cross-Functional Partnership: Collaborate with product managers, designers, and architects to translate business requirements into exceptional digital experiences, bridging the gap between technical constraints and product goals.


• Engineering Excellence & Innovation: Champion the evolution of engineering practices and the adoption of emerging technologies to continuously improve team efficiency, system quality, and operational scalability.

Required Skill Set

• Agentic Architecture & Control Patterns: Proven experience building agent loops (ReAct, Planning/Decomposition, Reflection, Multi-Agent Orchestration) and handling non-deterministic system design.


• Tooling & API Design: Experience defining strict JSON/OpenAPI schema interfaces optimized for LLM function calling and self-correcting error handling.


• State & Context Engineering: Expertise in state machine design, long-term memory (Vector/Graph RAG), and dynamic context window optimization (summarization, token budget management).


• Eval-Driven Development (EDD): Hands-on experience building automated evaluation pipelines (combining unit tests, schema checks, and LLM-as-a-Judge) to benchmark agent accuracy and prevent regressions.


• Agent Observability & Tracing: Proficiency with deep trajectory tracing tools (e.g., LangSmith, Phoenix, OpenTelemetry) to monitor execution graphs, latency, and token costs.


• Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) & Safety: Track record of designing HITL approval controls, sandboxed code execution (Docker/E2B), and guardrails against prompt injections or unintended tool actions.


• Technical Leadership & Pragmatism: Ability to define SLAs for non-deterministic products and know when to use deterministic code over fragile open-ended agent loops.