About the job

Senior Applied AI Engineer

📍 Sydney or Melbourne

🚀 Early-stage hyper-growth AI company | OpenAI Partner

Salient have partnered with an AI start-up who is scaling aggressively across Australia.

In less than 2 years, they’ve grown to 150+ employees globally, bootstrapped, profitable, and already partnering directly with some of the biggest players shaping the future of AI.

Are you tired of seeing “AI Engineer” roles advertised, only to realise it’s just basic API calling on top of existing models?

Or joining businesses that say they want to “do AI”, but aren’t actually ready, stuck endlessly building PoCs that never make it into production?

This is neither.

This team takes a genuine software engineering and research-driven approach to building agentic AI systems. You’ll be designing and deploying AI products that automate real workflows, solve real enterprise problems, and actually get shipped into production.

The focus here isn’t experimentation for the sake of it. It’s building scalable AI systems that deliver measurable impact in the real world.

This is a company deploying AI products into production at speed, solving real enterprise problems, and working directly with frontier models before they hit the public market.

Their partnership with OpenAI gives engineers early access to emerging models, features, and capabilities, meaning you’ll be testing and building with technology months before most of the industry catches up.

The engineering culture is heavily product-focused, deeply technical, and extremely fast-moving.

• No layers of bureaucracy.
• No endless approval chains.
• No waiting 6 months to ship.

The average time from idea → deployed AI solution is roughly 10-12 weeks.

If you’re someone who wants ownership, autonomy, and the chance to build AI systems that actually make it into production, this is the kind of environment that’s hard to find in Australia.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Deploying production-grade AI applications end-to-end
• Working directly with frontier LLMs and multimodal models
• Designing AI workflows, agents, orchestration layers, and automation systems
• Collaborating closely with product, engineering, and enterprise customers
• Rapid prototyping and shipping features at high velocity
• Solving complex enterprise problems using applied AI
• Experimenting with and evaluating the latest models before public release
• Influencing architecture, tooling, and engineering direction as the company scales

What They’re Looking For:

• Strong software engineering fundamentals
• Experience deploying AI/LLM products into production! (must have)
• Hands-on experience with modern AI tooling and frameworks
• Ability to move quickly in ambiguous, fast-paced environments
• Engineers who care about shipping, ownership, and product impact
• Strong communication and collaboration skills
• High agency individuals who enjoy solving hard problems

Tech Stack

The stack evolves quickly, but examples include:

• Python
• Claude, Open AI, Copilot
• LLM orchestration frameworks
• Vector databases
• Agentic workflows
• Modern AI evaluation and observability tooling

Why People Join?

• Direct access to frontier AI technology.
• Work alongside some of the best AI engineers globally, work and collaborate with people from London, Singapore and the UK.
• Equity from day one
• Extremely flat business structure, it’s promoted in the business to share your ideas.
• High trust, high ownership environment.
• Real production AI work, not endless PoCs
• Hyper-growth trajectory with significant upside