About the job
AI Engineer (Applied LLM & Agent Systems)
Location: Sydney or Melbourne, AU (Hybrid / Flexible)
Compensation: $170,000–$230,000 + Super + Equity
Eligibility: Australian Citizens / Permanent Residents only
About the Company
We’re partnered with a high-calibre, stealth-mode AI company building real-world, production AI systems at scale across APAC and Europe.
This is applied AI engineering at depth, designing, deploying, and operating LLM-powered systems that deliver measurable business impact. You will be working on Enterprise Level clients throughout, only using creativity and your engineering skills to help build the best agentic solutions.
The team is made up of engineers who’ve shipped serious systems before. The bar is high. The problems are real. The work goes into production quickly.
If you want to move beyond prototypes and build AI that actually operates in live environments, this is the place.
The Role
We’re hiring Mid–Senior AI Engineers to help design and deploy production-grade LLM and agent-based systems.
You’ll work across the full AI lifecycle:
- System design
- Model orchestration
- Guardrails & evaluation
- Deployment & monitoring
- Iteration & optimisation
You won’t just build demos.
You’ll own meaningful problem spaces and push systems into real-world environments.
This is a highly hands-on engineering role with real ownership, ideal for someone who wants to deepen their applied AI expertise while working alongside top-tier engineers.
What You’ll Be Doing
- Design and implement LLM-powered applications and agent workflows
- Move AI systems from experimentation to reliable production environments
- Build scalable backend systems to support AI inference and orchestration
Implement evaluation frameworks, monitoring, and guardrails (prompt injection, hallucination mitigation, etc.) - Collaborate closely with product and engineering to deliver measurable outcomes
- Optimise performance, reliability, and cost efficiency of deployed AI systems
- Contribute to evolving engineering standards and AI best practices
What We’re Looking For
- Australian Citizen or Permanent Resident
- 3–7+ years of software engineering experience
- Strong Python skills and experience with modern AI/ML tooling
- Hands-on experience building LLM-based systems (RAG, fine-tuning, tool use, agents, etc.)
- Experience deploying systems into production (APIs, cloud infra, CI/CD)
- Understanding of system design principles and scalable architectures
- Strong problem-solving ability and product mindset
- Comfortable working in fast-paced, high-ownership environments
Nice to Have
- Experience with agent orchestration frameworks
- Exposure to vector databases, embeddings, and retrieval pipelines
- Experience designing guardrails and evaluation pipelines
- Knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure)
- Startup or high-growth environment experience
- Strong interest in system reliability and performance optimisation
Interview Process
- Talent Screen
- Hiring Manager Interview
- Technical Interview (System Design + Practical Discussion)
- Final Leadership Conversation
You’ll be asked:
👉 “Tell us about the most impactful AI system you’ve built and deployed into production.”
Why Join?
- Work on frontier AI systems before they reach the market
- Build real production AI, not prototypes
- High autonomy and minimal bureaucracy
- Collaborate with elite global engineers
- Competitive salary + meaningful equity
- Clear pathway to Senior / Lead as the ANZ team scales
Note:
Unfortunately, sponsorship is not available. Applicants must be based in Australia with full working rights.
Interested in this role? Let’s chat adam.li@salientgroup.com.au
