Senior AI Engineer

Senior/Principal AI Engineer $180-220k + Super + equity Melbourne Only Company overview A well-funded, early-stage AI product company based in Melbourne, with real revenue, enterprise customers, and a roadmap that's outgrown the size of the team building it. Small engineering group, founders in the room daily, and a lot of ground still to cover. Role and responsibilities You'll work on real-time conversational AI where speed is the whole game: voice in, context understood, an answer back fast enough that it feels natural rather than laggy. That single constraint shapes most of the engineering decisions here. Expect to work across real-time audio at scale (turn-taking, interruptions, knowing when someone's actually finished speaking, all of it holding up under real load), agent context and knowledge (becoming the expert on a customer's product and surfacing the right answer inside a tight latency budget), and live understanding of what's happening on a user's screen to know when the agent should speak. This is a generalist role more than a narrow AI specialist one. You'll need real product taste, comfort shipping something imperfect and iterating fast, and the ability to explain a trade-off clearly to a non-technical audience, including a customer's engineering team. Key technical skills Deep in one of backend, frontend or infra, and genuinely capable in the other twoStrong fundamentals: system design, data flow, trade-offs, not just code to specReal intuition for what LLMs do reliably versus what only holds up in a demo, production agent experience is a bonus not a filterPython matters most, TypeScript, Kubernetes and cloud infra all featureReal-time, voice, video, streaming or low-latency systems experience is a strong plus, not required Melbourne. Hybrid, 3 days a week in office. Great culture and meaningful early-stage equity. Multiple roles available at Senior and Principal level.