Lead Applied AI Engineer
📍 Sydney or Melbourne | Hybrid
🚀 Frontier AI | Backed by OpenAI
🌍 Global presence across EMEA, APAC & NA
🇦🇺 Australian Citizen or Permanent Resident required
Salient has partnered with one of the fastest-growing and highest-performing AI teams in the world as they continue to scale their engineering presence across Australia.
Their ambition goes far beyond building AI products. They're helping some of the world's largest organisations deploy frontier AI into production and shape how humans and businesses will work with AI in the future.
We're looking for Lead Applied AI Engineers who want harder problems, greater ownership and the opportunity to remain deeply hands-on while leading complex AI deployments.
You won't be sitting above an engineering team drawing architecture diagrams or handing your designs to someone else to build.
Why engineers are joining
- Build at the frontier. Work with the latest OpenAI models and capabilities to solve problems that haven't necessarily been solved before.
- Stay hands-on. This is technical leadership without giving up engineering. You'll still spend meaningful time designing systems, writing Python and reviewing code.
- Own the outcome. Take projects from ambiguous customer problem → architecture → build → production, rather than owning one small part of a larger platform.
- Work with exceptional engineers. Join a high-calibre global engineering team across 7 locations, with a strong culture around software craftsmanship.
- Move quickly. Projects typically reach production in weeks rather than disappearing into multi-year transformation programmes.
- Real progression. Join while the Australian engineering team is still scaling, with the opportunity to have a genuine influence on how it grows.
- Equity + competitive compensation. Meaningful upside alongside the opportunity to build at the frontier of applied AI.
What you'll build
You'll lead enterprise AI deployments across agentic systems, tool calling, LLM orchestration, evaluation, retrieval, APIs and complex enterprise integrations.
You'll work directly with customers to understand what they actually need, sometimes challenging the original brief, before designing and shipping the solution.
You'll also mentor engineers and turn successful deployments into reusable patterns that can be applied globally.
You'll ideally have:
- Exceptional Python and software engineering fundamentals
- Experience building and deploying LLM / GenAI / agentic systems into production
- Strong architecture and system design capability
- Experience leading technically while remaining hands-on
- Confidence working directly with customers and senior stakeholders
- Experience taking ambiguous problems from 0 → production
- Strong opinions on testing, evaluation, reliability and maintainable software
- Curiosity, commercial thinking and a willingness to challenge assumptions
We're far more interested in what you've built, the decisions you made and whether it worked in production.
This isn't a research role, a pre-sales role or somewhere you'll spend six months building a POC.
It's for engineers who want to solve difficult problems, work directly with customers and ship production AI at speed.