22nd October, 2026

Senior Research Engineer – AI/Machine Learning (Lead, EL1) – Federal Government | Victoria

12-month contract | Onsite at least 4 days a week | Eligibility to obtain NV1 clearance

Hunter Professional is looking for a Senior Research Engineer to lead a high-impact applied AI project with a Federal Government agency.

You’ll design, build and evaluate a secure, human-in-the-loop AI system that triages extremist and distressing digital material. The aim is to reduce how much harmful content investigators are exposed to.

What you’ll do

- Lead the design and build of a multimodal triage system, using computer vision, NLP, audio and similarity detection (hashing and near-duplicate detection)
- Build secure, reproducible pipelines for data processing, model training and evaluation, including for restricted or disconnected environments
- Turn the needs of investigators and wellbeing staff into technical specifications and a secure-review interface
- Design rigorous evaluations, including precision and recall, calibration, adversarial testing and failure modes
- Contribute to privacy, ethics, security and responsible AI assessments
- Manage the technical plan, risks and reporting, and coordinate researchers and vendors

What you’ll bring





- A postgraduate qualification in computer science, AI, data science or a related field, or equivalent experience
- Experience delivering applied machine learning systems beyond the proof-of-concept stage
- Strong experience in at least two of: computer vision, image or video classification, NLP, multimodal ML, perceptual hashing, or audio analysis
- Advanced Python skills and experience with PyTorch
- A strong understanding of classification performance, including class imbalance, thresholds and uncertainty
- Experience working with sensitive or security-controlled information
- The ability to explain model behaviour and limitations to non-technical stakeholders
- Desirable: a PhD, a background in law enforcement, national security, digital forensics or online safety, and experience deploying on-premises or in air-gapped environments

Please note: This role involves controlled access to distressing material. Candidates will need to complete police, probity and explicit-material clearance checks. They must also be able to obtain a Negative Vetting Level 1 (NV1) clearance.

How to apply: Click “Apply” and submit your resume.

📌 Senior Research Engineer (Melbourne)
🏢 Hunter Professional
📍 Melbourne