Senior AI Systems Architect — Production-Scale & Hybrid

Westpac; Sydney; Hybrid; AUD 220,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Westpac is seeking a hands-on Chief AI Innovation Office leader in Sydney. The role shapes enterprise AI engineering and drives production-grade LLM, RAG, and agentic systems at scale in a hybrid work setup.

You will set directions across teams, build reusable platforms, guardrails, and golden paths, balancing cost, latency, security, privacy, and risk from day one. Engage stakeholders and lead with practical technical leadership.

Qualifications

• Hands-on AI engineering experience in large, complex, or regulated environments.
• Proven delivery and operation of AI, ML or LLM-enabled systems at production scale.
• Strong Python, APIs, distributed systems, cloud, containers, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, and secure engineering capability.
• Practical expertise in LLMs, RAG, embeddings, agents, orchestration, evaluation, context management, and AI observability.
• Exceptional business acumen and outstanding stakeholder management skills at all levels.
• Sound judgement across AI failure modes, responsible AI, security, privacy, reliability, and operational risk.

Responsibilities

• Architect and engineer production-grade LLM, RAG, plus agentic and machine-learning systems.
• Stay hands-on: write and review code, test assumptions, lead investigations and unblock critical delivery.
• Create reusable platforms, reference architectures, guardrails, and golden paths that accelerate multiple teams.
• Balance model quality, latency, resilience, cost, security, privacy, risk, and customer impact.
• Embed evaluation, observability, testing, responsible AI, and operational readiness from day one.
• Coach engineers through code reviews, design reviews, pairing, and practical technical leadership.
• Influence engineering, product, architecture, data, security, and risk partners without relying on formal authority.

Skills

Python

APIs

Distributed systems

Cloud

Containers

Infrastructure as code

CI/CD

Secure engineering

AI governance

Tools

LLM

RAG

Embeddings

Agents

Orchestration

AI observability

Job description

Westpac is seeking a hands-on Chief AI Innovation Office leader in Sydney. The role shapes enterprise AI engineering and drives production-grade LLM, RAG, and agentic systems at scale in a hybrid work setup.

You will set directions across teams, build reusable platforms, guardrails, and golden paths, balancing cost, latency, security, privacy, and risk from day one. Engage stakeholders and lead with practical technical leadership.