Lead AI Engineer

Just Digital People; City of Melbourne; On-site; AUD 120,000 - 150,000; Full time

Job summary

A fast-growing Australian tech company is seeking a Lead AI Engineer. This role involves leading the design, integration, and operation of AI features across customer-facing systems. Candidates should have a strong AI and software engineering background, hands-on experience with LLMs, and proven ML Ops expertise. The position offers the opportunity for ownership and influence in shaping AI applications at scale in a production environment.

Qualifications

• Strong AI and machine learning background with solid software engineering depth.
• Experience integrating LLMs via APIs in production environments.
• Proven ML Ops experience in customer-facing AI products.

Responsibilities

• Lead architecture and delivery of AI features for customers.
• Define processes for building agents and workflows.
• Own ML Ops deployment, monitoring, and lifecycle.

Skills

AI and machine learning expertise

Software engineering skills

Experience with APIs

ML Ops experience

Cloud experience (Azure preferred)

Job description

We’re working with a fast-growing Australian tech company that’s doing something rare: shipping real AI into real products, at scale.

They’re hiring a Lead AI Engineer to own how LLMs are designed, integrated, and operated across customer-facing systems. This isn’t research. The models already exist. The challenge is making them reliable, scalable, and genuinely useful in production.

This role sits right at the intersection of AI, software engineering, and ML Ops. You’ll set the technical direction, build alongside the team, and be accountable for how AI actually performs in the hands of users.

What you’ll be doing

• Leading the architecture and delivery of LLM-powered features used by customers
• Defining how agents, workflows, and automations are built using Google ADK and modern AI tooling
• Owning ML Ops end to end, deployment, monitoring, evaluation, governance, and lifecycle
• Translating real business problems into practical AI solutions that ship and scale
• Designing secure, production-grade AI systems in Azure (GCP or AWS experience is also fine)
• Setting standards, patterns, and guardrails for how AI is delivered across the platform
• Acting as the technical authority for AI, mentoring engineers and influencing platform direction

What they’re looking for

• Strong AI and machine learning background with real software engineering depth
• Hands-on experience integrating LLMs via APIs and platforms, not training models from scratch
• Building and owning agentic AI systems that act autonomously to deliver real-world outcomes with safe, monitored workflows.
• Proven ML Ops experience in production environments
• Experience building and supporting customer-facing AI products
• Solid cloud experience (Azure preferred; GCP or AWS also suitable)
• Someone autonomous, pragmatic, and comfortable owning decisions and outcomes

This is a role for someone who wants ownership, influence, and accountability, shaping how AI is used across a growing product, not experimenting on the sidelines.

If you’d like to hear more, feel free to reach out: