Lead AI Engineer

Lead AI Engineer, AI-enabled software delivery Sydney (hybrid) · Permanent 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. 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 Build the AI-enabled delivery practice: agentic coding workflows, spec-driven development, evaluation and review gates, and the reusable tooling behind them.Ship working systems on Azure, Azure OpenAI and Azure AI Foundry, in code you write yourself. AWS and GCP also considered.Work inside the squads to move them from experiments to everyday practice, and measure what changed: cycle time, quality, adoption.Set the standards other engineers follow: guidelines, patterns, evaluation criteria.Hold an 18-month view of where the architecture goes as models and tooling change. What you bring A software engineering background before AI. Data engineers who became software engineers are welcome; data science alone is not the fit.Hands-on building with large language models since 2023 at the latest: agents, retrieval, tool use, in production, in code you wrote.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.Azure and Azure AI Foundry first. Strong AWS or GCP builders are considered.Curiosity, experimentation and pace. Startup and small AI SaaS backgrounds welcome. This is not a governance or control role.Sydney based for a hybrid pattern, with full Australian work rights. Why apply Own how AI changes software delivery for a large organisation, with executive sponsorship behind you.A senior engineer's seat with a senior manager's mandate: influence across squads without the management load.Stay hands-on at enterprise scale, on a modern Azure stack, with an open slate on tooling. How to apply Send your CV and a short note on one AI system you built yourself since 2023: what it does, who uses it, and what changed in how software got delivered. Applications are confidential.