Technical Lead (AI Engineering)
- Own the AI strategy for a major Australian enterprise.
- Lead a team while remaining deeply hands-on with architecture and development.
- Build production AI systems that solve real customer problems at scale.
Job Description
Technical Lead (AI Engineering) | Melbourne | Build the Future of Enterprise AI
- Own the AI strategy for a major Australian enterprise
- Lead a team while remaining deeply hands-on
- Build production AI systems that solve real customer problems at scale
Most AI jobs today fall into one of two categories.
They're either research-heavy roles where your work never reaches production. Or they're feature teams adding an LLM to an existing product and calling it AI.
This isn't either of those.
This is an opportunity to define how AI is engineered across one of Australia's largest and most recognisable organisations. You'll take ownership of AI architecture, guide technical direction, and lead a team delivering intelligent systems that operate at genuine enterprise scale.
What's in it for you?
- Own the technical direction for AI Engineering across a high-profile product platform.
- Lead a squad of engineers while staying hands-on with architecture and development.
- Build production AI systems that customers interact with every day.
- Work on Agentic AI, RAG, vector search, intelligent automation, and LLM-powered workflows.
- Influence engineering standards, AI architecture, and platform strategy from day one.
- Work alongside experienced engineering and product leaders who value technical excellence.
The Role
This is an AI Engineering role, not a Data Science position. You'll be responsible for taking AI capabilities from concept through to production, ensuring they're scalable, observable, secure, and commercially valuable.
You'll lead a team of engineers while remaining close to the technology, making key architectural decisions and helping establish the engineering practices that will underpin future AI initiatives.
You'll work across areas such as:
- Large Language Models (LLMs)
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
- Agentic AI
- Vector databases
- Prompt and context engineering
- AI orchestration
- AI observability and evaluation
- Production AI platforms
You'll collaborate closely with Product, Engineering and business stakeholders to identify opportunities where AI can deliver meaningful customer and commercial outcomes.
What You'll Bring
You're probably a Software Engineer first, who has evolved into AI Engineering.
You'll bring experience across:
- Strong C#/.NET engineering background
- Python for AI and backend services
- AWS cloud technologies (experience with Bedrock and SageMaker highly regarded)
- Distributed systems and event-driven architecture
- Microservices and API-first design
- Building and operating production AI or ML systems
- RAG, vector databases, AI agents, MCP or similar modern AI patterns
- CI/CD, observability, monitoring and engineering best practices
Leadership experience is equally important. You'll have mentored engineers, influenced architecture, and helped raise the technical capability of the teams around you.
Unfortunately, candidates requiring visa sponsorship or holding temporary work visas cannot be considered.
If you're looking for one of Australia's most impactful AI Engineering opportunities, where you'll shape strategy, remain hands-on, and build AI systems that operate at genuine enterprise scale, we'd love to hear from you.
Apply now or reach out to Karl directly at karl@theonset.com.au for a confidential conversation.
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