Lead AI Engineer

Job Description

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Lead AI Engineer, AI-enabled software delivery Sydney (hybrid) · Permanent

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A large, well-established Australian financial services organisation is building a central AI and data team and is hiring a senior hands-on engineer into it. Your job is to bring AI into how software gets built: agent-assisted coding, spec-driven development, AI in testing and review, and the shared tooling and patterns that make it stick across the engineering squads.

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This is a senior individual contributor seat, not a people-management role. You do not run a team. You work alongside the delivery squads, set the practice they follow, and answer to the executive who owns AI and data for the organisation. The data platform is in place; the rest of the tooling is an open slate.

What you will do \n

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• Build the AI-enabled delivery practice: agentic coding workflows, spec-driven development, evaluation and review gates, and the reusable tooling behind them.
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• Ship working systems on Azure, Azure OpenAI and Azure AI Foundry, in code you write yourself. AWS and GCP also considered.
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• Work inside the squads to move them from experiments to everyday practice, and measure what changed: cycle time, quality, adoption.
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• Set the standards other engineers follow: guidelines, patterns, evaluation criteria.
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• Hold an 18-month view of where the architecture goes as models and tooling change.
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What you bring \n

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• A software engineering background before AI. Data engineers who became software engineers are welcome; data science alone is not the fit.
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• Hands-on building with large language models since 2023 at the latest: agents, retrieval, tool use, in production, in code you wrote.
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• Six to twelve months of AI-enabled software delivery in practice (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot or tooling you built) that changed how a codebase or a team ships.
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• Azure and Azure AI Foundry first. Strong AWS or GCP builders are considered.
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• Curiosity, experimentation and pace. Startup and small AI SaaS backgrounds welcome. This is not a governance or control role.
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• Sydney based for a hybrid pattern, with full Australian work rights.
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Why apply \n

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• Own how AI changes software delivery for a large organisation, with executive sponsorship behind you.
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• A senior engineer's seat with a senior manager's mandate: influence across squads without the management load.
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• Stay hands-on at enterprise scale, on a modern Azure stack, with an open slate on tooling.
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