Senior AI Engineer

About the ROLE:

• Location: Sydney
• Permanent Full-time Role

The Senior AI Engineer is the most senior hands-on engineer in the AI & Data practice. You will design and build production agentic AI solutions for Australian utilities, lead the technical work on client engagements and set the engineering standards the rest of the team builds to.

Our AI work is built mainly on the Microsoft platform: Microsoft Foundry for agents, orchestration, governance and guardrails, with Databricks and Azure data services underneath. The solutions we build go into operational environments, including field safety, asset performance and customer operations, so they have to be grounded, tested, secure and explainable before anyone relies on them.

This is a build role. You will be judged on working software that clients use, not on slides. You will also guide AI engineers in the nxzen India delivery team, support the Practice Lead in pre-sales with prototypes and estimates, and help turn what we build for one client into reusable assets for the next.

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Key responsibilities for the role include:

Solution Engineering

• Design and build agentic AI solutions on Microsoft Foundry, including agent configuration, orchestration, memory, session management, escalation logic and guardrails.
• Build multi agent workflows using AutoGen, Semantic Kernel or the Microsoft Agent Framework, integrated with Azure Logic Apps, Durable Functions and Power Automate where business process logic sits.
• Build retrieval augmented generation pipelines with the AI Data Engineer: chunking strategy, vector indexes, hybrid search, grounding and source citation.
• Integrate AI solutions with client systems such as enterprise asset management, GIS, ADMS and customer platforms, including through the Model Context Protocol where appropriate.
• Design for reuse: modular, build once components that can be repurposed across use cases and clients.

Quality, Safety & Assurance

• Apply a Test, Evaluate, Verify and Validate (TEVV) approach to every solution, with automated evaluation harnesses for accuracy, groundedness, safety and regression.
• Plan and run red teaming inside Microsoft Foundry to the approach agreed with the AI Architect, and close the findings before release.
• Build logging, tracing and monitoring into solutions so that behaviour in production is observable and auditable.
• Apply secure by design practice, including identity through Microsoft Entra ID, least privilege access and protection of client data within agreed onshore boundaries.

Technical Leadership

• Act as technical lead on client engagements, owning the engineering plan and the quality of what the team delivers, within the solution architecture agreed with the AI Architect.
• Set and maintain engineering standards for the practice: repository structure, code review, CI/CD, testing and documentation.
• Mentor AI Engineers onshore and guide engineers in the nxzen India delivery team, including orientation to Australian client, security and regulatory expectations.
• Use approved AI-assisted development tools, including GitHub Copilot, and help the team use them well.

Pre-sales & Asset Development

• Support the Practice Lead and the AI Architect with effort estimates and working prototypes for bids.
• Present technical solutions to client architects and technology leaders with clarity and credibility.
• Contribute to the practice’s library of reusable agents, patterns and accelerators.

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About YOU

• Six or more years of professional software engineering, with at least two years building large language model applications that have gone into production.
• Hands-on experience with Microsoft Foundry (formerly Azure AI Foundry): agents, orchestration, governance, guardrail setup and model deployment.
• Experience with at least one agent framework such as AutoGen, Semantic Kernel or the Microsoft Agent Framework, and with reusable, modular agent architecture.
• Strong Python, with working knowledge of C# or TypeScript.
• Experience building retrieval augmented generation, including chunking, embeddings, vector search, grounding and citation.
• Experience with Azure Logic Apps, Durable Functions and Power Automate for workflow and business logic.
• Practical experience of AI evaluation, TEVV and red teaming, and of building observability into AI systems.
• Sound engineering discipline: Git, code review, automated testing, CI/CD and infrastructure as code.
• A sprint oriented, analytically sharp way of working, and the ability to explain technical choices to non-technical stakeholders.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Engineering, Data Science or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.

Desirable Experience & Attributes:

• Background in energy, water or other critical infrastructure environments.
• Exposure to voice interfaces (speech-to-text and text-to-speech) for field or mobile users.
• Proficiency in Databricks, Unity Catalog and MLflow.
• Experience integrating with utility systems such as SAP, Maximo, GIS or ADMS.
• Demonstrated ability to lead distributed onshore and offshore teams.
• Consulting or professional services experience.
• Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Apps and Agents Developer Associate (AI-103) or Azure AI Engineer Associate (AI-102).
• Microsoft Certified: Azure Solutions Architect Expert (AZ-305).
• Databricks Certified: Generative AI Engineer Associate.

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