Forward Deployed AI Engineer

KeyFlux

We are looking for someone who wants to help solve one of the harder problems in enterprise AI: how do you let AI systems actually do useful things inside complex organisations, without giving up control?

At KeyFlux, we are building technology that allows organisations to deploy AI and autonomous systems into real enterprise environments with strong controls around identity, authority, access, policy and auditability.

We are looking for a Forward Deployed AI Engineer to work directly with us and our customers to design, build and deploy these systems.

This is not a narrowly defined software engineering role.

AI engineering is changing quickly, and many of the skills required to do this well did not exist in their current form a few years ago. We care much more about evidence that you can understand complex systems, learn quickly and build things that work than whether you have five years of experience in a particular framework.

What you will work on

You will work across customer environments to understand where AI can create real operational value and then help turn that into working systems.

That could mean

- Building and integrating LLM and agentic AI applications
- Connecting AI systems safely into existing enterprise applications, APIs, data and infrastructure
- Designing controls around what agents can access, decide and execute
- Working with identity, authentication, authorisation, policy and short-lived access
- Designing secure architectures across cloud, on-premise and hybrid environments
- Building prototypes quickly, testing assumptions and taking successful ideas into production
- Understanding how systems might fail, be abused or behave unexpectedly
- Working directly with customer engineering, security and architecture teams




- Helping shape the KeyFlux platform as we learn from real deployments

You will need to be comfortable moving from a whiteboard architecture discussion to a terminal and back again.

What we are looking forThere is no single background that qualifies someone for this role.

You might currently be a security engineer, AI engineer, platform engineer, architect, penetration tester, cloud engineer or someone who sits somewhere between all of those.

We are particularly interested in people with a combination of:

- Hands-on AI and LLM development or integration experience
- Solid understanding of APIs, distributed systems and modern application architectures
- Cyber security experience
- An offensive security mindset and the instinct to ask, "How could this break?"
- Experience designing or understanding enterprise architecture
- Cloud-native, platform or infrastructure experience
- Ability to work across the full system rather than only one layer of the stack
- Strong technical curiosity and the ability to learn unfamiliar technologies quickly

Specific programming languages matter less to us than the ability to build.

Python is useful. So are TypeScript, Go, Rust, Java and plenty of other languages. The frameworks will change. We care more about whether you understand what you are building, why it works and where it can fail.

AI experience

We know this is a new field.

We are not expecting ten years of "AI agent engineering" experience because that person does not exist.





What we do want is evidence that you have been exploring and applying the technology.

Perhaps you have built agentic workflows, experimented deeply with LLMs, created tool-using agents, integrated models into existing systems, worked with RAG or vector databases, built MCP tooling, explored model security, or simply gone much further than using ChatGPT as a user.

Show us what you have built and what you have learned.

The kind of person we think will enjoy this

You are curious.

You pull systems apart to understand how they work.

You are equally interested in how something should be designed and how someone might break it.

You enjoy working on problems where the answer is not already written in a textbook.

You are comfortable learning in public, changing your mind and working across disciplines.

And you would rather show us something interesting you have built than show us another qualification.

Academic credentials are welcome, but they are not what will get you hired.

Evidence of curiosity, capability and learning will.

Why KeyFlux

We are working at the intersection of AI, cyber security, identity, enterprise architecture and distributed systems.

The challenge is no longer simply getting an LLM to answer a question.

The interesting problem is giving AI systems the ability to interact with real organisations while making sure they only have the authority they need, when they need it, and that humans remain in control.

If that sounds like the kind of problem you would like to spend your time thinking about and building, we would like to hear from you.

Show us what you have built. Tell us about something you learned recently. Tell us about a system you broke, fixed or redesigned.

We care much more about that than a perfectly formatted CV.

📌 Forward Deployed AI Engineer (Australia)
🏢 Keyflux
📍 Australia