We're currently looking for an AI/ML Staff Engineer to join our financial services client in Sydney on a 6 month, rolling contract to lead the design of complex software systems
The role will encompass both hands-on engineering & leadership; you will lead technical delivery from initial system design through to development and production, while mentoring more junior devs and enhancing the team's overall capability and productivity.
Key Responsibilities
Architectural Strategy & Vision:
Lead the design of complex software systems, advocating for a "target state" architecture that prioritizes resilience, security, scalability, and cost-effectiveness across the domain.
Technical Leadership & Execution:
Drive the end-to-end development of innovative solutions to address complex technical challenges, ensuring all implementations align with business needs and engineering best practices.
Mentorship & Team-oriented Culture:
Provide high-level technical guidance and mentorship to engineers, fostering a culture of knowledge sharing and collaboration within your squad and across upstream/downstream partners.
Cross-Functional Partnership:
Collaborate with product managers, designers, and architects to translate business requirements into exceptional digital experiences, bridging the gap between technical constraints and product goals.
Engineering Excellence & Innovation:




Champion the evolution of engineering practices and the adoption of emerging technologies to continuously improve team efficiency, system quality, and operational scalability.
Required Skill Set
Agentic Architecture & Control Patterns:
Proven experience building agent loops (ReAct, Planning/Decomposition, Reflection, Multi-Agent Orchestration) and handling non-deterministic system design.
Tooling & API Design:
Experience defining strict JSON/OpenAPI schema interfaces optimized for LLM function calling and self-correcting error handling.
State & Context Engineering:
Expertise in state machine design, long-term memory (Vector/Graph RAG), and dynamic context window optimization (summarization, token budget management).
Eval-Driven Development (EDD):
Hands-on experience building automated evaluation pipelines (combining unit tests, schema checks, and LLM-as-a-Judge) to benchmark agent accuracy and prevent regressions.
Agent Observability & Tracing:
Proficiency with deep trajectory tracing tools (e.g., LangSmith, Phoenix, OpenTelemetry) to monitor execution graphs, latency, and token costs.
Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) & Safety:
Track record of designing HITL approval controls, sandboxed code execution (Docker/E2B), and guardrails against prompt injections or unintended tool actions.
Technical Leadership & Pragmatism:
Ability to define SLAs for non-deterministic products and know when to use deterministic code over fragile open-ended agent loops.

📌 Ai Staff Engineer (New South Wales)
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