Lead Applied AI engineer

Fetchpet; Sydney; Hybrid; AUD 180,000 - 320,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Equity

Hybrid work

Sydney office

Job summary

Fetch is a Sydney-based company focused on pet health powered by data and AI. We are seeking a senior, hands-on AI builder to lead applied AI at Fetch – setting direction, choosing models and approaches, building them, measuring effectiveness and shipping them into products.

Your core mission is to make Fetch exceptionally good at understanding pet health, powering vet and pet-parent workflows, interpreting health records and automating insurance-related tasks.

Qualifications

• 3+ years building and shipping ML or AI systems in production.
• Strong experience with modern LLMs and applied AI systems.
• Deep understanding of evals and measuring model quality.
• Experience with post-training, fine-tuning, RAG, structured outputs or similar techniques.

Responsibilities

• Lead applied AI at Fetch – setting direction, choosing models and approaches.
• Build them yourself and ship into real products.
• Own Fetch’s pet health intelligence layer and ensure end-to-end model quality.

Job description

Fetch is how modern pet parents give their pets the best care. One pink app for insurance, health and care.

We’ve raised our Series A from Lightspeed and Airtree, we’re rated 4.9 on Google, #1 by CHOICE, and we’re growing fast.

We think AI is going to fundamentally change how we care for pets.

We have pet health data, an in-house team of vets and vet nurses, and we build our own product and technology. We want to turn that into an intelligence layer that understands each pet deeply – their history, health and what might matter next.

The role

This is a senior, hands-on builder role.

You’ll lead applied AI at Fetch – setting the direction, choosing the models and approaches, building them yourself, measuring whether they actually work, and shipping them into real products.

Your core job is simple: make Fetch exceptionally good at understanding pet health.

That capability will power everything from helping pet parents care for their pets, to supporting vets, interpreting health records and automating parts of insurance.

We don’t need someone with a particular academic pedigree. We want someone who is obsessed with what modern models can do, moves quickly, experiments constantly and knows how to turn new capabilities into reliable products.

Location:

Sydney, hybrid, 3 days in office

Employment type:

Full time

Compensation:

Series A salary + meaningful equity

Working with:

Co-founders, engineering, product, data, vets and vet nurses. We’re flat, fast and care about the best idea.

What you’ll build and own

Fetch’s pet health intelligence layer:

models and systems that can understand messy, longitudinal pet health information and reason over it

Model quality end-to-end:

datasets, evals, model selection, prompting, retrieval, post-training, fine-tuning, guardrails and monitoring

A serious evaluation system:

clear benchmarks for what good looks like, where models fail and whether a new model is actually better

Domain-specific AI:

turning proprietary pet health data and expert veterinary knowledge into capabilities generic models don’t have

Multimodal understanding:

health records, documents, images and, over time, richer inputs like video

Safe production AI:

working closely with our vets, compliance and engineering teams to make sure the systems we ship are reliable and clinically appropriate

The next generation of Fetch products:

you’ll be deeply involved in product direction and help decide what we should build with AI, not simply implement someone else’s roadmap

The beginnings of an exceptional AI team:

this is a core capability for Fetch and we expect the team around it to grow

You’ll use whatever approach works best.

Sometimes that will mean a frontier closed-source model. Sometimes an open-source model. Sometimes RAG, tools or better context. Sometimes fine-tuning or post-training.

We care about getting to the best result, measuring it properly and improving it quickly.

About you

You’re an exceptional applied AI builder who wants a lot of ownership.

You’ve probably spent the last few years building with modern ML and LLMs and have gone much deeper than plugging an API into a product.

This might look like:

3+ years building and shipping ML or AI systems in production

Strong experience with modern LLMs and applied AI systems

Deep understanding of evals – how to construct them, measure model quality and use failures to drive improvement

Experience with post-training, fine-tuning, RAG, structured outputs, tool use or similar techniques

Strong instincts around training data – what data matters, how to structure it and how to improve its quality

Enough engineering ability to take an idea from experiment to production

Good judgement about when to use a frontier model, an open-source model, retrieval, fine-tuning or something simpler

Strong product thinking – you care what the system enables for the user, not just the benchmark score

Comfortable working directly with domain experts to turn human expertise into data, evals and model behaviour

Experience in health, veterinary care or insurance is useful. It isn’t required.

A PhD isn’t required either. We care much more about what you’ve built, how you think and how quickly you learn.

You’ll probably love this role if:

You’re all in on AI and believe it can make the world meaningfully better

A new model drops and your first instinct is to try it

You’re optimistic about where the technology is going and curious about what becomes possible next

You’re empirical – you test things rather than arguing about them in theory

You move quickly and like turning experiments into real products

You’re brave enough to try approaches that might fail

You want a huge amount of influence over product and technical direction

You want to build the capability yourself before building a team around it

You like working with very smart people from different disciplines

You love pets

You probably won’t love this role if:

You want to spend most of your time managing rather than building

You need a research paper before you’re comfortable trying something

You think your job ends when a model works in a notebook

You’re attached to one model, vendor or technical approach

You prefer long research cycles over shipping, measuring and iterating

You need a defined roadmap handed to you

You want everyone to stay neatly inside their lane

What it’s like here

The Fetch team is ambitious, smart, hard-working, thoughtful and kind.

You’ll work directly with the founders and be involved early in product and company strategy.

We build our own platform and products, so there are very few layers between an idea and something being used in the real world.

You’ll have access to proprietary pet health data, vets and vet nurses who deeply understand the domain, and an engineering team that can help turn models into products.

We use AI constantly ourselves. New tools, models and ideas are there to be tried rather than put through months of approvals.

And you’ll be working on something that matters – eventually helping millions of pets live healthier, happier lives.

Competitive Series A salary + meaningful equity

Hybrid working – 3 days Sydney office, flexible WFH

Latest MacBook Pro and a top setup

Unlimited AI tooling – if it helps you build, use it

Two team retreats each year

Office dogs for cuddles and interruptions

Bean-to-cup coffee, unlimited fruit and snacks. Toblerone on tap

Inclusive parental leave

5 weeks annual leave