Lead AI Engineer

Galileo Search; Sydney; Hybrid; AUD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Galileo Search is seeking a Lead AI Engineer to advance AI-enabled software delivery in a large Australian financial services organisation. You will architect and implement agent-assisted coding, spec-driven development, and testing enhancements across squads, reporting to the AI/data executive.

You must bring hands-on ML/AI delivery experience on Azure and other clouds, and thrive in a senior IC, hands-on role in a hybrid Sydney environment.

Qualifications

• Software engineering background required; data engineers welcome.
• Hands-on building with large language models since 2023 or later.
• Experience delivering AI-enabled software delivery for 6–12 months.
• Azure-first with Azure AI Foundry; strong AWS or GCP skills
• Sydney-based with Australian work rights.

Responsibilities

• Build AI-enabled delivery practice: agentic coding workflows and tooling.
• Ship systems on Azure, Azure OpenAI, and Azure Foundry; code you write.
• Move squads from experiments to everyday practice and measure impact.
• Set engineering standards, guidelines, and evaluation criteria.
• Maintain a 18-month architectural view as tooling evolves.

Skills

Software engineering

LLMs & AI tooling

Azure AI Foundry

AWS/GCP

Experimentation pace

Tools

Azure OpenAI

Azure AI Foundry

AWS

GCP

Job description

Lead AI Engineer, AI-enabled software delivery Sydney (hybrid) · Permanent

A large, well-established Australian financial services organisation is building a central AI and data team and is hiring a senior hands-on engineer into it. Your job is to bring AI into how software gets built: agent-assisted coding, spec-driven development, AI in testing and review, and the shared tooling and patterns that make it stick across the engineering squads.

This is a senior individual contributor seat, not a people-management role. You do not run a team. You work alongside the delivery squads, set the practice they follow, and answer to the executive who owns AI and data for the organisation. The data platform is in place; the rest of the tooling is an open slate.

What you will do

• Build the AI-enabled delivery practice: agentic coding workflows, spec-driven development, evaluation and review gates, and the reusable tooling behind them.
• Ship working systems on Azure, Azure OpenAI and Azure AI Foundry, in code you write yourself. AWS and GCP also considered.
• Work inside the squads to move them from experiments to everyday practice, and measure what changed: cycle time, quality, adoption.
• Set the standards other engineers follow: guidelines, patterns, evaluation criteria.
• Hold an 18-month view of where the architecture goes as models and tooling change.

What you bring

• A software engineering background before AI. Data engineers who became software engineers are welcome; data science alone is not the fit.
• Hands-on building with large language models since 2023 at the latest: agents, retrieval, tool use, in production, in code you wrote.
• Six to twelve months of AI-enabled software delivery in practice (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot or tooling you built) that changed how a codebase or a team ships.
• Azure and Azure AI Foundry first. Strong AWS or GCP builders are considered.
• Curiosity, experimentation and pace. Startup and small AI SaaS backgrounds welcome. This is not a governance or control role.
• Sydney based for a hybrid pattern, with full Australian work rights.

Why apply

• Own how AI changes software delivery for a large organisation, with executive sponsorship behind you.
• A senior engineer's seat with a senior manager's mandate: influence across squads without the management load.
• Stay hands-on at enterprise scale, on a modern Azure stack, with an open slate on tooling.