Hybrid Lead AI Engineer - Hands-on Technical Leader

Westpac Bank; Sydney; Hybrid; AUD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Westpac Bank is seeking a Superstar Lead AI Engineer to drive a major AI solution from concept to production in a hybrid Sydney/Melbourne setup. You will own technical direction, architecture, reviews, and acceptance criteria while hands-on coding, testing, and production support remain part of your remit.

You will mentor engineers, shape API/data flows, and apply governance-by-design for privacy, security, and Responsible AI across the stack.

Qualifications

• Hands-on full-stack engineering across architecture, software, data, AI, integration and operations.
• Strong design of APIs, events, data flows, service boundaries, identity, state, audit and failure recovery.
• Strong AI service engineering across ML, LLMs, RAG, agents, evaluation, tool controls, monitoring and safe fallback.
• Strong secure delivery, automated testing, CI/CD, observability, resilience and production-support practice.
• Governance-by-design expertise spanning traceability, evidence, privacy, human approval and control-aware delivery.
• Complex financial service domain experience highly regarded as is previous People Leadership experience.
• Demonstrated technical leadership through clear decisions, mentoring, design and code review, and reusable patterns.
• Sound judgement about where AI adds value and where a simpler solution is safer or more effective.

Responsibilities

• Lead a major solution or technical workstream from intent through design, build, verification, release and operation.
• Set solution-level architecture, engineering standards, contracts, boundaries and acceptance criteria.
• Guide AI-powered full-stack engineering across software, data, AI, integration and user experience.
• Build security, privacy, Responsible AI, resilience, observability, rollback and recovery into the solution.
• Lead technical reviews, resolve cross-cutting risks and elevate service-wide decisions when required.
• Mentor engineers and turn delivery lessons into reusable patterns and practical guidance.
• Compare technology choices against required outcomes and simpler alternatives rather than relying on product assumptions.

Skills

Hands-on full-stack engineering

AI service engineering

Security & privacy in AI

Observability & production support

Mentoring engineers

Tools

CI/CD pipelines

API design

Job description

Westpac Bank is seeking a Superstar Lead AI Engineer to drive a major AI solution from concept to production in a hybrid Sydney/Melbourne setup. You will own technical direction, architecture, reviews, and acceptance criteria while hands-on coding, testing, and production support remain part of your remit.

You will mentor engineers, shape API/data flows, and apply governance-by-design for privacy, security, and Responsible AI across the stack.