About the job
Senior Applied AI Engineer
📍Melbourne or Sydney (Hybrid)
🚀 Backed by OpenAI
Salient has partnered with one of the most exciting AI companies in the world, and we’re looking for Senior Applied AI Engineers who are builders at heart.
This isn’t a research role.
It isn’t an internal platform team.
And it definitely isn’t another position where you’ll spend your days wrapping APIs around ChatGPT or building demos that never reach production.
Instead, you’ll work directly with enterprise customers to solve genuinely complex business problems, designing and deploying AI systems that create measurable impact in production.
In the last two years, the business has grown to more than 180 people, recently became part of the OpenAI ecosystem, and is now helping some of the world’s largest organisations adopt frontier AI at speed.
If you love building software, solving hard engineering problems, and seeing your work deployed in weeks rather than months, you’ll feel right at home.
The Role
As a Senior Applied AI Engineer, you’ll sit at the intersection of software engineering, AI, architecture and customer delivery.
You’ll embed with customers to understand their business, identify opportunities where AI can genuinely transform workflows, then design and build production-ready solutions from the ground up.
One week you might be designing an agentic workflow to automate complex business processes.
The next you’ll be building evaluation frameworks, orchestrating multiple LLMs, integrating enterprise systems, or working alongside OpenAI engineers using capabilities that haven’t yet been released publicly.
This is an engineering-first role.
The best people in the team aren’t just AI enthusiasts—they’re exceptional software engineers who happen to build AI systems.
What You’ll Be Doing
- Work directly with enterprise customers to understand complex business problems and uncover high-value AI opportunities.
- Design, build and deploy production AI applications from discovery through to production.
- Build agentic AI systems, orchestration layers, evaluation frameworks, tool calling workflows and enterprise integrations.
- Rapidly prototype, iterate and ship customer solutions—typically within 10–12 weeks.
- Work with OpenAI’s latest frontier models before public release.
- Partner with Product, Engineering and customer stakeholders to shape technical direction.
- Own customer outcomes, not just technical delivery.
The people:
The people who thrive here tend to be naturally curious builders.
They enjoy understanding how things work, writing great software, learning quickly, and solving problems that don’t have obvious answers.
They care about customer outcomes, but they’re equally passionate about engineering quality.
They’re the kind of people who would happily spend an afternoon debating software architecture, refactoring code to make it cleaner, or experimenting with the latest AI capabilities not because they have to, but because they genuinely enjoy building.
What They’re Looking For
Above everything else, they’re looking for great engineers, builders at heart.
People who genuinely care about writing clean, maintainable software and understand what good engineering looks like, even in an AI-first world.
You’ll likely have:
- Strong Python software engineering fundamentals.
- Experience building production-quality software, not just prototypes.
- Commercial experience deploying AI, LLM or agentic applications into production.
- Strong understanding of software architecture and system design.
- Experience working directly with customers or stakeholders to solve business problems.
- Excellent communication skills, you enjoy explaining technical concepts to engineers and executives alike.
- High ownership and a bias towards building.
- Comfortable operating in fast-moving, ambiguous environments.
A Note on Engineering
AI can help write code.
That’s not enough here.
This team believes the best AI engineers are still engineers first.
They know how to structure a codebase, write elegant Python, reason through system design, review code critically, and build software that’s maintainable long after the demo is over.
If you rely entirely on AI to write your code, you’ll probably struggle.
If you love building software and take pride in writing clean, production-grade Python, you’ll thrive.
Why Join?
This isn’t a company experimenting with AI.
AI is the business.
You’ll join one of the fastest-growing engineering teams in the market, working on customer problems that genuinely matter while getting access to technology most engineers won’t see for months.
Benefits:
- Early access to OpenAI’s latest models and capabilities.
- High levels of ownership from day one.
- Flat engineering structure with direct access to leadership.
- Very little bureaucracy and no unnecessary politics.
- Work that reaches production in weeks, not quarters.
- Equity from day one.
- A team of genuinely exceptional engineers who care deeply about software craftsmanship as much as AI.
Tech You’ll Work With:
- Python
- OpenAI
- Claude
- Cursor
- LangGraph
- LangChain
- MCP
- Agentic AI Frameworks
- RAG
- Vector Databases
- AI Evaluation Frameworks
- Modern Observability Tooling
Additional Recruiter note:
Please be advised that applicants must be an Australian Citizen or Permanent Resident.
Interested in this role? Reach out to adam.li@salientgroup.com.au
