Senior AI Data Engineer

Humanforce; City of Melbourne; Hybrid; AUD 170,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flex@HF

Learning & development

Talent referral program

Parental leave (12 weeks)

Wellbeing days

Employee Assistance Program

Rewards & recognition program

Thrive financial wellbeing

Collaborative culture

Job summary

Humanforce is seeking a Senior AI Data Engineer in Melbourne to join the Automation & AI team. You will focus on knowledge management services, AI-enabled capabilities, retrieval systems, and pipelines that support them.

You will operate at the intersection of software engineering, automation, data, and applied AI, turning experiments into secure, reliable production systems and guiding engineering direction.

Qualifications

• Strong backend engineering experience with TypeScript/Node.js and Python.
• Ingest, transform, index, and retrieve structured and unstructured information.
• Solid understanding of data pipelines (batch, streaming, event-driven).
• Experience modelling data for operational and analytical use cases in PostgreSQL.
• Practical experience integrating large language models into production.
• Knowledge of retrieval-augmented generation, embeddings, semantic search, and document indexing.
• Ability to evaluate AI system quality with measurable criteria and governance.
• Understanding of prompt design, outputs, tool use, and failure handling.

Responsibilities

• Integrate LLMs or generative AI services into software applications.
• Develop retrieval-augmented generation pipelines and semantic search.
• Design prompts, outputs, and tool-call interactions with models.
• Build agentic systems with planning, memory, and orchestration components.
• Develop workflow engines, rules, and business process automation.
• Process and retrieve structured and unstructured information efficiently.
• Implement robust data pipelines with batch, streaming, and event-driven processing.
• Evaluate AI systems with tests, metrics, and production monitoring.
• Ensure AI security, privacy, auditability, and governance throughout systems.

Skills

TypeScript

Node.js

Python

Backend engineering

Ingest/transform/index data

PostgreSQL data modelling

AI model integration

Retrieval-augmented generation

Data pipelines

Observability/ validation

Job description

Humanforce’s vision is to make work easier and life better for frontline and flexible workforces.

Humanforce provides the market leading, best-in-one human capital management (HCM) suite for frontline and flexible workforces - without compromise. Our employee centred, intelligent and compliant HCM suite is highly integrated and composable, and consists of Workforce Management (WFM), HR, Talent, Payroll, and Wellbeing.

Humanforce has built strong foundations since its founding in 2002. We help over 2300 customers and almost 1 million employees under management in 30+ countries, across a wide range of industries, including aged, child and health care; education; hospitality; retail; local government and more. Today, we have offices across Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom, North America and the Philippines.

Customers choose Humanforce because we enable them to deliver an exceptional employee experience, build a compelling employee value proposition, and connect the flow of the world’s talent with the growth, productivity and efficiency objectives of frontline and flexible workforces.

Who you are

We are looking for a Senior AI Data Engineer to join our Automation & AI team and help build the next generation of intelligent products, platforms, and internal capabilities. You will focus on knowledge management services, AI-enabled capabilities, retrieval systems, and the pipelines that support them.

You will join a team working at the intersection of software engineering, automation, data, and applied AI. The work will involve both established engineering practices and emerging technologies, providing the opportunity to influence how intelligent capabilities are designed, delivered, governed, and scaled.

You will have the opportunity to contribute across customer-facing products, internal platforms, knowledge systems, workflow automation, and foundational data services while helping shape the team’s technical direction and engineering practices.

This role is suited to an engineer who enjoys working across system boundaries, is comfortable navigating emerging and ambiguous technical domains, and can turn experiments into secure, reliable, and maintainable production capabilities.

What you will do

• Integrating large language models or generative AI services into software applications.
• Retrieval-augmented generation, semantic search, embeddings, chunking, metadata design, and document indexing.
• Prompt design, structured model outputs, tool calling, and model failure handling.
• Agentic systems involving planning, tool execution, memory, orchestration, and human oversight.
• Workflow engines, rules systems, business process automation, or orchestration platforms.
• Processing and retrieving structured and unstructured information.
• Data pipelines, batch processing, streaming, and event-driven processing.
• AI and retrieval evaluation, including test datasets, quality measures, regression testing, and production monitoring.
• AI security and responsible AI considerations, including prompt injection, sensitive data exposure, access control, auditability, and appropriate human review.

What you’ll need

• Strong TypeScript, Node.js, Python, or equivalent backend engineering experience; TypeScript and Node.js should remain primary where alignment with the wider platform is important
• Experience developing services that ingest, transform, index, and retrieve structured and unstructured information
• Strong understanding of data pipelines, batch processing, event-driven processing, and data quality controls
• Experience working with PostgreSQL and data modelling for operational and analytical use cases
• Practical experience integrating large language models into production applications
• Understanding of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), embeddings, semantic search, chunking, metadata design, and document indexing
• Experience evaluating AI system quality using measurable criteria rather than relying solely on manual testing
• Understanding of prompt design, structured outputs, tool use, model limitations, and failure handling
• Experience implementing access controls, privacy protections, auditability, and data governance within AI or knowledge systems
• Strong understanding of data lineage, observability, validation, and error recovery
• Ability to evaluate emerging AI technologies and determine where they provide genuine product or operational value

Some ‘nice to haves’

• Experience with vector search technologies or PostgreSQL vector extensions
• Experience with document processing, entity extraction, classification, or knowledge graphs
• Familiarity with agentic architectures, planning, memory, tool execution, and workflow orchestration
• Experience with model evaluation frameworks, test datasets, hallucination detection, and regression testing
• Experience with streaming platforms, data warehouses, transformation frameworks, or data orchestration tools
• Familiarity with machine learning operations, model gateways, model monitoring, and cost optimisation

Our values

• We are bold
• We are all in
• We are customer obsessed
• We do what we say
• We are good humans

Our approach to flexibility

We are passionate about people making their own decisions about where and when they work. Our hybrid model of minimum two days a week of in office moments supports flexibility tailored to individual and team needs, empowering people to achieve their career and personal goals.

• A truly flexible workplace through our Flex@HF approach
• The opportunity to be part of a fast-growing global tech company
• A focus on learning and development through Humanforce HR
• A generous talent referral program – know great people, be rewarded
• 12 weeks paid parental leave for primary carers, 4 weeks’ for secondary
• 4 extra days leave to focus on your wellbeing
• Contemporary and practical Employee Assistance Program
• A cool reward and recognition program – shout to your colleagues and earn points to spend
• Access to our own financial wellbeing platform Thrive – including earned wage access, tools to budget and save, perks and cashback across 100s of Australian retailers
• Fun, collaborative culture with passionate people
• A workplace where you can genuinely improve the world of work!

We are a diverse and dispersed organisation and are actively looking to grow our team with individuals from all diverse backgrounds. We encourage applicants from all backgrounds, cultures, ages, genders, neurodiversity, religions, sexual orientations, and experiences to apply.