About the job

Staff AI Engineer

📍 Sydney or Melbourne | Hybrid

🚀 Part of the OpenAI ecosystem

Salient is partnering with one of the most exciting Applied AI businesses in the world to find Lead / Staff-level AI Engineers capable of leading complex Generative AI projects from architecture through to production.

This isn’t a research role, an internal platform team, or another job wrapping APIs around ChatGPT.

You’ll work directly with major enterprise customers, taking ambiguous business problems and determining what should be built, how it should be architected, and how a team gets it into production. Autonomy and Ownership will be guaranteed for you to succeed in leading projects with your stamp.

As a staff AI engineer, you’ll remain deeply hands-on while providing technical leadership across projects.

What you’ll be doing:

• Lead GenAI projects from technical discovery → architecture → production
• Own system design and major technical decisions
• Build production agentic and LLM-powered applications
• Design tool-calling workflows, structured outputs, evaluations, and enterprise integrations
• Establish engineering standards and guide other engineers
• Work directly with senior customer stakeholders
• Write production-quality Python and solve the hardest technical problems yourself
• Work with frontier AI capabilities, including technology ahead of broader public release

We’re looking for engineers with:

• Exceptional Python/software engineering fundamentals
• Strong architecture and system design experience
• Production GenAI / LLM / agentic AI experience
• Experience owning technical direction or leading engineering projects
• Strong understanding of tool calling, structured outputs, evaluation, and modern LLM systems
• A production mindset across testing, reliability and observability
• Confidence working directly with customers and senior stakeholders

You don’t need to be an Engineering Manager.

This is for engineers who want more technical influence without moving away from building.

The team cares deeply about engineering quality. AI can help you write code, but it can’t replace engineering judgement.

Why join?

🚀 Work at the frontier of Applied AI

🏗️ Own architecture, not tickets

🤖 Access the latest OpenAI models and capabilities

⚡ See projects reach production in weeks, not quarters

🧠 Work alongside genuinely exceptional engineers

📈 Staff/Lead IC career path