Lead AI Engineer - Intelligence & Protection

Westpac Group; Sydney; Hybrid; AUD 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Job summary

Westpac Group in Australia is seeking a hands-on technical leader for AI Services to build a major Financial Crime Protection intelligence solution in a hybrid Sydney or Melbourne setup.

You will bring domain SME expertise, guide backend services, APIs, data, AI components, and guided human review experiences while ensuring safe, auditable decisions.

This role emphasizes governance, security, and production readiness, with cloud-native patterns, versioned releases, and mentoring engineers.

Qualifications

• Deep Financial Crime Protection domain SME experience.
• Strong backend, API and web app development capabilities.
• Experience with AI services, ML signals or LLMs is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Lead the financial crime protection intelligence solution from concept to production.
• Define data contracts, signals, models, and review workflows.
• Mentor engineers and translate domain needs into safe production outcomes.

Skills

Go

Python

SQL

TypeScript

React

Next.js

API Design

Data Governance

Job description

Sydney, NSW, Australia

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Job Description

• Build intelligence that hits hard on financial crime
• Sydney or Melbourne Based / Hybrid Working

Time to make real impact and protect our customers!

Join AI Services as the hands‑on technical leader for a major Financial Crime Protection intelligence solution.

You will bring deep Financial Crime Protection domain expertise and build and guide complete products across governed data, backend services, APIs, AI and accessible review experiences.

Importantly, you will set solution‑level directions while staying close to design, code, testing and production support. The systems you lead will support authorised decisions without making fraud, AML, employee, customer or operational decisions.

How you will help beat the bad guys …

• Lead a major Financial Crime Protection intelligence solution from intent through design, build, verification, release and operation.
• Bring Financial Crime Protection domain‑SME thinking into engineering decisions, translating complex fraud, AML and protection needs into safe, practical production outcomes.
• Set clear boundaries between signals, investigation, human decisions and actions in other systems.
• Create traceable contracts across source data, events, entities, facts, signals, models, agents, reviews and downstream systems.
• Ensure missing, stale, denied, incomplete and unavailable information is reported honestly.
• Enforce agent controls outside the model, with approved bounded tools, access controls and safe action boundaries.
• Protect sensitive and Highly Protected data through least privilege, minimisation, pseudonymisation and controlled disclosure.
• Lead versioned and reversible releases for data contracts, models, embeddings, APIs and workflows, with tested rollback and recovery.
• Mentor engineers and turn specialist delivery lessons into reusable patterns.

Key Ingredients for Success …

• Deep Financial Crime Protection domain‑SME experience, with strong practical knowledge of fraud, AML, investigations, intelligence workflows, controls and human decision‑making in a complex regulated environment.
• Expert full‑stack engineering across backend services, APIs, data stores and modern web applications, with relevant technologies including Go or Python, SQL, TypeScript, React and Next.js.
• Strong API, event, dataflow and service‑boundary design, including identity, entitlements, state, audit and recovery.
• Strong data, graph and investigation engineering covering lineage, time, quality, entity resolution, bounded traversal and purpose‑based access.
• Strong AI service engineering across ML signals, LLMs, RAG, agents, prompt and model evaluation, tool controls, versioning, monitoring and fallback.
• Strong engineering for accessible human review, including evidence, provenance, uncertainty, approval, disposition and recovery.
• Sound judgement about when rules, SQL, conventional ML, graphs or generative AI provide the simplest safe solution.

Work with purpose …

You will help deliver practical AI outcomes while applying Westpac engineering, security, privacy, Responsible AI, risk and operational resilience requirements. Approved AI tools may support delivery, but people remain accountable for design, controls, review and production decisions.

You will lead solution‑level engineering for sensitive Financial Crime Protection intelligence outcomes—bringing genuine domain‑SME credibility, keeping evidence traceable, tools bounded and human decision authority explicit.

Let’s build AI safety that matters …

We’re all about creating a supportive and inclusive community. We welcome everyone – no matter your age, gender, background, or abilities. We also provide additional support to welcome our veterans, Indigenous Australians, and neurodiverse community.

If you need any adjustments during the recruitment process, you can find out more information and additional contact details by visiting the"People with Disability and/or needing Accessibility Requirements"page on our website .