Solara Digital is looking for a Senior MLOps Engineer to work at a major Australian Government client for a 12 month contract. You’ll help shape its machine learning operations, taking models from data science into reliable, well-governed production systems that support services used by millions of Australians.

The role

This is a senior (EL1-equivalent) role. You’ll help set MLOps strategy and practice, and work hands-on with data scientists, engineers, product teams and business stakeholders. You’ll:

- Build automated CI/CD pipelines to test, deploy, monitor and retrain ML models
- Plan and drive data engineering solutions that balance functional and non-functional requirements, including security and compliance
- Productionise algorithms and models built by data scientists, and advise on which techniques work best
- Lead release planning and risk assessment, with rollback processes and post-release reviews
- Plan and drive testing across the ML lifecycle
- Apply ethical AI practices and assess privacy risks
- Contribute to standards, policies and guidelines for data engineering, testing and deployment
- Explain solution designs clearly to product managers and business stakeholders

About you

- 3+ years in AI/ML engineering with a proven track record of putting models into production
- A degree in computer science, statistics, mathematics or a related field,



ideally with a focus on ML, AI or data science (advanced degree preferred)
- Solid Python, SQL and Spark/PySpark
- Experience with MLflow, Kubeflow or similar
- Containerisation and Kubernetes (Red Hat OpenShift highly regarded)
- Batch and streaming data pipelines, plus data lake technologies such as Hadoop, Hive, Impala and Kafka
- Relational databases, distributed file systems and blob storage
- Solid Linux and Git skills
- Experience working at SFIA Level 5 in data engineering, release and deployment, and testing, and Level 4 in machine learning

The details

- Location: Brisbane, Melbourne or Sydney (CBD)
- Arrangement: Onsite for the first 6 weeks, then hybrid. You’ll need to live within reasonable travel distance of the office.
- Start: 1 December 2026
- Contract: Initial 12 months, with extension options
- Clearance: You must be an Australian citizen and able to obtain and maintain a Baseline security clearance. Current clearance holders are highly regarded.

How to apply

Apply by Friday 16 October 2026. Shortlisted candidates will be asked for two referees, ideally managers from the last 4 years, and a one-page response to the selection criteria. Submissions are exclusive, so please only apply if you haven’t been put forward for this role by another agency.

📌 Machine Learning Ops Engineer (Melbourne)
🏢 Solara Digital
📍 Melbourne