AI Data Engineer Hybrid

Wesfarmers OneDigital is building Australia's leading data and digital retail ecosystem, underpinned by AI across everything we do. We operate across four pillars - loyalty, data, retail media and AI, turning millions of customer interactions into insights that shape how Australians shop, live and connect.

We're expanding one of our most innovative teams and are looking for exceptional talent to join the AI Build Squad to help our divisions make the most of emerging technologies. 

We're hiring three exciting new opportunities: AI Engineer, Senior AI Engineer, and AI Data Engineer.

This is your chance to build cutting-edge AI solutions that reach millions of customers across Australia's leading retailers. You'll work at the forefront of emerging technologies, solve complex business challenges, and help accelerate our AI transformation journey.

The AI Data Engineer designs and builds the data components that AI and GenAI solutions depend on. Working alongside AI Engineers and business teams, the role determines what information a solution needs, where it lives and how it should be made available — sometimes through conventional data engineering, and sometimes through retrieval, search, semantic models, metadata or APIs that present enterprise information to an agent. 

The role brings deep practical experience with data platforms such as Snowflake and Microsoft Fabric, but this is not a platform administration position — the focus is on using those platforms to solve business problems. The AI Data Engineer builds and maintains pipelines, transformations and integrations, designs data models and semantic structures that reflect the meaning of the underlying business information, and works with AI Engineers on RAG, embeddings, vector search, metadata and context design. 

What you’ll do

• Design and build the data components needed by AI and GenAI solutions 
• Build and maintain data pipelines, transformations and integrations using platforms such as Snowflake and Microsoft Fabric 
• Work out how agents and AI applications should access enterprise data safely and efficiently 
• Build retrieval pipelines for structured and unstructured information 
• Work with AI Engineers on RAG, embeddings, vector search, metadata and context design 
• Design data models and semantic structures that reflect the meaning of the underlying business information 
• Connect source systems, analytical platforms, operational systems, APIs and AI applications 
• Implement appropriate controls for data quality, validation, lineage and provenance in partnership with Data Governance and data owners. 
• Design data access with security, privacy and permissions in mind from the start 
• Make data design decisions within agreed data architecture and escalate material security, privacy, governance and cost trade-offs. 
• Diagnose issues involving missing, poor-quality, poorly structured or inaccessible data 
• Tune data workloads and retrieval patterns where performance or cost matters 
• Build automated testing, deployment and monitoring for data pipelines and data products 
• Use batch, event-driven or near-real-time approaches depending on the needs of the solution 
• Work directly with business SMEs to understand the meaning of their data, rather than relying only on technical schemas 
• Create reusable patterns and components when the same data problem is likely to appear elsewhere 
• Keep current with relevant developments in enterprise data platforms, retrieval and AI data architecture 
• Use AI-assisted development extensively for data discovery, engineering, testing and documentation 

What you’ll need

• Strong experience designing and building enterprise data solutions, 5+ years of relevant data engineering experience 
• Hands-on experience with Snowflake, Microsoft Fabric or comparable modern data platforms; deep experience with both an advantage 
• A tertiary qualification in Computer Science, Data Engineering, Software Engineering, Information Systems or a related field is desirable but not essential
• Experience running production data pipelines with testing, monitoring and operational support 
• Experience integrating data platforms with applications and APIs 
• Experience working with relational, analytical, semi-structured and unstructured data 
• Experience with enterprise privacy, security and data governance requirements, and with distributed processing (Spark), dbt or similar transformation frameworks and event streaming 
• Deep SQL capability and strong programming skills in at least one modern language 
• Strong knowledge of data modelling, transformation, ingestion and orchestration 
• A practical understanding of how GenAI applications use data, including RAG, embeddings, search and retrieval patterns, and familiarity with vector databases, semantic models, ontologies or knowledge graphs 
• An understanding of how metadata, semantic structure and data quality affect AI behaviour 
• Experience designing secure data-access patterns, including identity, permissions and segregation of sensitive data; knowledge of data quality, lineage, provenance, ownership and retention concepts 
• Good software engineering practices, including Git, CI/CD and automated testing 
• Familiarity with Azure AI, Azure OpenAI, Google Vertex AI or similar platforms and relevant cloud data services 
• The ability to work with business SMEs to understand what data actually means in context 

About Wesfarmers

As one of Australia’s largest listed companies, we’re proud of our longstanding contribution to Australians. We continually reinvent ourselves and invest in the businesses we own and operate, including leading retailers like Bunnings, Kmart, Target, Officeworks and Priceline. We also have an online offering, including OnePass and the Group shared data asset. Our work doesn’t stop there, we operate in the industrials sector which supplies the nation with chemicals, energy and fertilisers, and industrial and safety products. And we participate in an integrated lithium joint venture, including the operation of a mine and concentrator and the development of a refinery.

Join the team at Corporate Office which provides support and advice across the Wesfarmers Group

The Corporate Office provides corporate services and support to the autonomous businesses within the Wesfarmers Group, enabling the achievement of Group objectives. It leads capital allocation and portfolio management for the Group and focuses on leveraging and enhancing the Group’s reputation to support attraction and retention of talent, securing investment opportunities and maintaining a low-cost capital. To do this, we need great people, working together and role modelling our values and ways of working.

Our culture

We’re results focused, but we’re a business that cares. Here we are less about titles and more about everyone playing a valuable role. We provide autonomy and space with freedom to operate, quickly learning from mistakes because we know they are part of the way forward. We’re curious, open minded, and collaborative. And although we’re thought leaders, we’re humble, and willing to share knowledge and learn from one another.

We know that diversity fosters greater innovation and better customer connection, so we strive to create an inclusive and diverse work environment.

Next steps

If this sounds like your next career move, click on the ‘Apply’ button . Please note that we may commence interviewing of candidates prior to this closing date.

We’re hiring the best and the brightest talent. Let’s start to explore the possibilities of achieving great things together.

For more information, visit our website at https://www.wesfarmers.com.au