Lead AI Engineer

Lead AI Engineer | GenAI, LLMs & Agentic Systems

Sydney CBD | Hybrid – 3 days office / 2 days WFH
Up to $160k + Super + Equity

The Opportunity

We're partnering with an innovative, technology-driven Australian business looking for a Lead AI Engineer to take ownership of its growing AI capability.

This is an exciting opportunity for a hands-on AI Engineer who enjoys solving real-world problems, experimenting with emerging technologies and turning AI concepts into production-ready solutions.

You'll have significant autonomy to shape the technical direction, evaluate different AI approaches and build intelligent products that deliver genuine business and customer value.

What You'll Be Doing

• Lead the design, development and deployment of production-grade AI/LLM solutions.
• Build and optimise solutions leveraging LLMs, RAG, agentic workflows, tool use and fine-tuning.
• Develop robust evaluation frameworks to measure model quality, accuracy, reliability and performance.
• Experiment with different models and approaches, including open-source and proprietary LLMs.
• Own the end-to-end AI engineering lifecycle, from experimentation and prototyping through to production.
• Establish engineering best practices around model evaluation, monitoring, safety and scalability.
• Work closely with product and engineering stakeholders to translate business challenges into practical AI solutions.
• Help shape the organisation's long-term Applied AI capability and technical direction.

What We're Looking For

• Strong hands-on experience building and deploying AI/ML or LLM-powered solutions into production.
• Deep understanding of modern Generative AI, including LLMs, RAG, embeddings, agents and model evaluation.
• Experience with fine-tuning, post-training or other model optimisation techniques.
• Strong Python and software engineering fundamentals.
• Ability to design evaluation methodologies, establish benchmarks and systematically improve model performance.
• Experience making technical decisions around model selection, quality, latency, cost and scalability.
• Comfortable operating independently in a fast-moving environment with evolving requirements.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to work collaboratively with technical and non-technical stakeholders.

You don't necessarily need an existing Lead title. We're equally interested in strong Senior AI Engineers who are ready to take greater technical ownership.

Why Consider This Opportunity?

• Technical ownership: Shape an AI capability rather than inherit an established approach.
• Hands-on engineering: Stay close to the technology while influencing technical strategy.
• Modern AI challenges: Work across LLMs, RAG, agents, evaluation and model optimisation.
• Real-world impact: Build AI solutions that directly influence customer experiences.
• Equity opportunity: Share in the long-term growth of the business.
• Flexible working: Sydney CBD office three days per week, with two days working from home.

Interested?

If you're an experienced AI Engineer who enjoys building, experimenting and taking ownership of meaningful technical challenges, we'd love to hear from you.

Apply now or reach out to Joseph Lee at Method Recruitment Group for a confidential discussion.