Job Description

As the Principal Engineer, AI & Emerging Technology, you will serve as TAL's most senior technical specialist in AI engineering, shaping the direction, architecture, and governance of AI capabilities across the enterprise. You will lead the design and implementation of innovative solutions spanning generative AI, agentic systems, and production machine learning, while partnering closely with delivery teams to solve complex technical challenges and accelerate adoption of emerging technologies.

Through the development of reference architectures, reusable engineering patterns, and technical standards, you will drive best practice, strengthen engineering capability, and ensure solutions are secure, reliable, and fit for purpose within a regulated life insurance environment. Combining deep technical expertise with enterprise-wide influence, you will play a pivotal role in transforming complex AI innovations into scalable, practical solutions that deliver meaningful business value.

In this role you will:

- Set the technical direction and reference architectures for AI solutions across the portfolio, covering generative AI, agentic systems, ML and the platforms that support them.




- Own critical design decisions in partnership with Architecture, ensuring solutions align with TAL's technology strategy, platform foundations and integration patterns.
- Provide technical assurance on high-risk designs, acting as the escalation point for complex engineering trade-offs.
- Work directly with delivery pods on complex engineering problems e.g. complex integrations, agentic workflows, performance, reliability and evaluation.
- Define and evolve engineering standards, patterns and best practices for AI development, including agentic software development, CI/CD, testing and observability.
- Champion reuse of shared AI platforms, gateways and governance tooling, and contribute to their design and evolution.
- Identify and address technical risks including model risk, data privacy, security and drift, partnering with Cyber and Risk on controls.
- Stay at the forefront of advancements in AI, machine learning and agentic engineering, and evaluate current technologies and approaches that can advance TAL's AI capabilities.

📌 Principal Engineer (Sydney)
🏢 TAL
📍 Sydney