Senior AI Engineer / Forward Deployed Engineer

Halcyon Knights; Melbourne; Hybrid; AUD 166,000 - 277,000; Full time

Job summary

Halcyon Knights is seeking a Senior AI Engineer / AI Architect in Melbourne to design and ship long-running, transactional AI agents for a seed-stage travel tech startup. This 3-month contract (with possible extension) features hybrid work and a direct impact on production systems from day one.

You will bring deep expertise in LLM agent architectures, LangChain and LangGraph, and build scalable, reliable agent platforms that handle growth and real transactions.

Qualifications

• Production experience building and shipping LLM agent systems.
• Deep knowledge of LangChain and LangGraph frameworks.
• Experience with agents that take real actions or execute transactions.
• Strong systems and architecture skills at product scale.
• Ability to be productive from day one with modern AI tools.
• Available to start at short notice.

Responsibilities

• Design architecture for long-running, transactional AI agents.
• Moving agent features from prototype to production.
• Evaluating framework/tooling trade-offs and implementing decisions.
• Building reliability, observability and failure handling at scale.
• Leaving a solid foundation for Series A growth.

Skills

LLM agent systems

LangChain

LangGraph

Transactional agents

System architecture

Job description

Senior AI Engineer / AI Architect

Melbourne | 3 Month Contract + Possible Extension | Daily Rate | Hybrid

An Australian travel technology startup is building AI-powered booking tools that make travel planning faster and more personal. They’ve closed their seed round, are targeting Series A in about six months, and need a senior applied AI engineer to design and ship the agent systems the product runs on.

This isn’t a research or traditional ML role. You’ll work in a forward-deployed way: close to the product, building agents that run for long periods, execute real transactions and need to hold up as volume grows. In three months you’ll move the agent platform from where it is today to production-ready.

What you’ll be doing

• Designing the architecture for long-running, transactional AI agents
• Taking agent features from prototype to reliable production
• Making framework and tooling calls with a clear view of the trade-offs
• Building in reliability, observability and failure handling as scale increases
• Leaving a solid foundation the team can build on toward Series A

Must Have

• Production experience building and shipping LLM agent systems
• Deep knowledge of agent frameworks such as LangChain or LangGraph, including how they work underneath
• Experience with agents that take real actions or execute transactions
• Strong systems and architecture skills at product scale
• The ability to be productive from day one with modern AI tools
• Availability to start at short notice

Halcyon Knights is an equal opportunities employment agency, valuing the contributions made by all people and welcomes applications from people with disability, Aboriginal Australians, people of all ages and from culturally diverse backgrounds.