Lead/Staff AI Engineer

Lead/Staff AI Engineer We're hiring a Lead/Staff AI Engineer to join an Australian fintech that's building its entire AI capability in-house, from the ground up. This is a rare chance to own the tooling layer between engineers and the AI coding agents they build with, not just use AI tools, but architect and harden the systems that make agent-authored code safe to ship. The business processes significant transaction volumes for customers across Australia and is investing heavily in AI as its next major growth lever, under experienced fintech leadership with a track record of scaling data and AI capability at some of the country's best-known payments businesses. This is a senior role reporting to the Head of AI Engineering, with genuine scope to shape technical direction, not just execute within an existing framework. The scope runs above the title, everyone here is expected to operate a level beyond their role. What You'll Be Working On Architecting and building the coding agent harness, including MCP servers, tooling, integrations, conventions and workflowsPreparing the core Ruby on Rails codebase for agent-authored change: clear module boundaries, strong test coverage, and interfaces that contain blast radiusDesigning evaluation frameworks and feedback loops to measure agent performance and workflow effectiveness at scaleLeading investigation of failures and performance issues, feeding learnings back into the harness and agentsOwning security, privacy and guardrail controls, and the automated checks and rollback paths that stop agent-authored change regressing critical systemsLeading incident response for the coding agent and supporting systems: triage, recovery, root cause analysisBuilding reusable tooling and driving adoption of AI-native development practices across engineering teams Tech Environment Backend: Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQLAI/Agent Tooling: MCP servers, coding agent harnesses, evaluation frameworksCloud & Infrastructure: AWS, Terraform What We're Looking For 5+ years of software engineering experience, with substantial time spent shipping and supporting production systems at senior levelStrong Ruby on Rails and PostgreSQL experienceHands-on experience using AI coding agents in a real codebase, with a clear, opinionated view of where they help and where they don'tA track record building developer tooling, internal platforms, or developer experience work that other engineers depended onPractical experience with MCP servers, tool integrations, or comparable agent toolingSolid AWS experience and comfort with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)Direct experience owning incident response end to end: triage, containment, recovery, and writing up root cause afterwardsExperience working in financial services or another domain where reliability genuinely matters What's On Offer Permanent role, total comp package up to $300K for the right candidateHybrid working arrangementBuild an AI-native fintech stack from the ground upAccess to best-in-class AI tooling, invested in properly so you can move fastClear development and career progression opportunitiesBiannual offsites around Australia to foster cooperation with colleagues in other states Interested? Apply now or reach out directly to have a confidential conversation.