Lead AI Scientist, Knowledge Agents for Banking

Westpac; Sydney; On-site; AUD 180,000 - 290,000; Full time

Job summary

Westpac is building a reusable Knowledge Agents capability to help frontline employees find accurate, secure and trusted answers. We are seeking a Lead AI Scientist who will own the technical roadmap, lead retrieval and agent design, and build a growing team in a highly regulated banking environment.

The role is hands-on and requires leadership to ensure quality, security and responsible AI practices while delivering scalable, enterprise-grade knowledge solutions for contact centres, AI

Qualifications

• 8+ years in data science and applied AI, with senior leadership experience.
• Delivery of enterprise knowledge agents, retrieval-augmented generation or related LLM-enabled solutions.
• Deep practical expertise across retrieval, grounding, knowledge ingestion, content provenance, agent orchestration, evaluation, monitoring and LLMOps.
• Strong understanding of permission-aware access, privacy, security and model risk in high-trust environments.
• Credibility with senior business and technology stakeholders and ability to explain uncertainty and manage risk-based decisions.
• Experience with frontline servicing, contact centres, mortgage operations or enterprise knowledge management.

Responsibilities

• Own the Consumer Knowledge Agents technical roadmap with business, Product, Digital and Technology partners.
• Lead hands-on technical direction across knowledge ingestion, retrieval, grounding, orchestration and access controls.
• Own end-to-end solution quality from evaluation to production monitoring.
• Ensure all solutions meet AI risk policies including privacy, security and Responsible AI.
• Agree shared components, interfaces, and ownership across teams.
• Recruit, lead and develop a high-performing team and maintain strong technical governance.

Skills

Data science

Applied AI

Leadership

LLM-enabled systems

Knowledge management

Privacy & security

Tools

Knowledge ingestion

Retrieval-augmented generation

LLMOps

Content provenance

Job description

Westpac is building a reusable Knowledge Agents capability to help frontline employees find accurate, secure and trusted answers. We are seeking a Lead AI Scientist who will own the technical roadmap, lead retrieval and agent design, and build a growing team in a highly regulated banking environment.

The role is hands-on and requires leadership to ensure quality, security and responsible AI practices while delivering scalable, enterprise-grade knowledge solutions for contact centres, AI