Hands-On Principal AI Engineer — Agentic AI Systems

Salient Group; Sydney; On-site; AUD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Salient Group in Australia is seeking a senior engineering leader who remains hands-on while building production-grade AI agents for enterprise deployments. You’ll own architecture, write code, mentor engineers and drive decisions from discovery to production.

This role blends the responsibilities of a Principal Engineer and Engineering Director, with strategic influence and deep technical ownership, collaborating with senior stakeholders to deliver tangible commercial impact.

Qualifications

• Extensive hands-on software engineering experience, especially with Python.
• Strong system design and distributed architectures with robust testing.
• Experience building and deploying AI-powered applications into production.
• Ability to mentor engineers and influence technical decisions while remaining hands-on.

Responsibilities

• Build AI agents and multi-agent systems for production use.
• Own technical architecture and lead design decisions.
• Deliver production AI from prototype to deployment, monitoring and optimisation.
• Lead through engineering by mentoring engineers and establishing standards.
• Partner with enterprise leaders to translate business problems into scalable AI solutions.

Skills

Python

System design

APIs

Distributed systems

Testing & quality

AI code evaluation

Tools

LLM deployment

Tool calling

Vector databases

Job description

Salient Group in Australia is seeking a senior engineering leader who remains hands-on while building production-grade AI agents for enterprise deployments. You’ll own architecture, write code, mentor engineers and drive decisions from discovery to production.

This role blends the responsibilities of a Principal Engineer and Engineering Director, with strategic influence and deep technical ownership, collaborating with senior stakeholders to deliver tangible commercial impact.