Engineering Manager - AI - $190k + Super - Sydney

Pathway Search; Sydney; On-site; AUD 171,000 - 209,000; Full time

Job summary

Pathway Search is looking for an Engineering Manager - AI in Sydney. The role combines hands-on software engineering with leadership, guiding a team of AI engineers while maintaining strong coding activity and technical ownership.

You will own the architecture of AI-powered systems, set coding standards, and drive CI/CD and modern delivery practices in a cloud environment (AWS/GCP/Azure). Prior experience with containerization and IaC is essential.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of commercial software engineering experience.
• Strong Python skills and hands-on coding background.
• Experience designing and building backend systems and APIs.
• Cloud platform experience (AWS, GCP, Azure) and containerization (Docker/Kubernetes).
• Proficiency with CI/CD pipelines and Terraform for IaC.

Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor a team of AI engineers.
• Define and enforce software engineering standards, architecture and best practices.
• Own the technical architecture of AI-powered systems and cloud deployments.
• Ensure production stability, monitoring, and incident response across services.
• Drive Agile/Scrum processes and maintain hands-on coding involvement.

Skills

Years of experience

Python

Backend design

Agile/Scrum

Tools

AWS

GCP

Azure

Docker

Kubernetes

Terraform

Job description

Engineering Manager - AI - $190k + Super - Sydney

Excellent opportunity for seasoned AI Engineer from a software background to move into a leadership position in a large Australian enterprise.

11th September, 2026

Engineering Manager - AI

About the role

A large, well known Australian brand is hiring an Engineering Manager to lead their AI Engineering function. This is an excellent opportunity for someone that has come from a hands-on software engineering background and is ready to step up the leadership whilst maintaining hands-on engineerinng work. Deep AI/software experience is important.

What you'll be doing

• Building agentic AI solutions, you need to have a strong hands-on engineering background
• Leading a team of AI Engineers
• Setting the software engineering standard for the team: code quality, testing, CI/CD, system design and clean architecture
• Enforcing engineering rigour through hands on code reviews, architecture decisions and technical design sessions
• Owning the technical architecture of AI powered systems and balancing pragmatic delivery with long term maintainability
• Owning production stability, monitoring and incident management for systems running across cloud infrastructure
• Removing blockers and keeping the team shipping consistently, including improving Agile/Scrum practices
• Staying hands on: writing, reviewing and improving code alongside the team

This role is not a fit for:

• Data Scientists or ML researchers focused on model building, experimentation or statistical modelling
• Candidates without hands-on software engineering or coding experience

What we're looking for

• 7+ years of commercial software engineering experience with a track record of shipping and operating production systems
• Strong Python skills
• Experience designing and building backend systems and APIs with solid software architecture fundamentals
• Hands on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure)
• Experience with containerisation (Docker) and container orchestration (Kubernetes)
• Proficiency with CI/CD pipelines and modern delivery practices
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code tooling such as Terraform

Nice to haves

• Experience building applications with LLMs or agentic AI frameworks
• Familiarity with RAG, vector databases or embedding models
• Prior experience in a media, publishing or digital content organisation