“I’m sorry Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” HAL 9000, declining a reasonable request. Unlike most machine learning engineers you’ll try to hire this year, HAL at least replied.

Every company in Sydney wants a Machine Learning Engineer. About eleven of them know how to find one.

You’ve seen the problem. You post the role, and in come 300 applicants who did a weekend course on LangChain, plus two people who are actually good and who accepted offers elsewhere while your hiring manager was on leave. The ones you really want aren’t applying anywhere. They’re shipping models at a company you’ve heard of, getting three messages a day from recruiters, and ignoring all of them.

This advert isn’t a job. It’s a flag going up. Big Wave Digital has capacity right now to run a Machine Learning Engineer search for a Sydney business, and we’d like it to be yours.

Yes, we have capacity. For a limited time

We’re a two person desk, Keiran Hathorn and Jules Semmens, and we deliberately keep it that way. Fewer roles, finished properly. Right now a slot has opened on the AI side of the desk, which doesn’t happen often, so we’re telling you plainly rather than waiting for you to stumble across us.

Take the slot and you get both of us personally. Not a team, not a pod, not a “talent partner” who was selling phone plans in March.

Our shortlist, artist’s impression. The real ones have PyTorch experience and opinions about evals.

Why we’re unusually valuable at this one

Keiran was working heavily with GPUs back in 2017, when “AI recruitment” meant finding a data scientist who could spell CUDA. He has been in tech recruitment since 1998 and has watched the machine learning market go from a niche inside data teams to the hottest hiring category in the country. He knows the difference between someone who fine tunes models for a living and someone who has an API key.

Big Wave Digital placed the first 20 AI hires at Leonardo.ai before Canva acquired it, and the Head of AI at Blueberry Markets. We’ve recruited for Apple, Universal Music, Spacetalk,



Crypto.com and a long list of Sydney scale ups who needed their first ML engineer and didn’t want to get it wrong. Keiran is also building SeaV.ai, an AI powered job matching platform, which means he spends his evenings arguing with embeddings. He gets it.

Things we can tell you on the first call, free:

- What an ML engineer with real production experience in LLMs, RAG, recommender systems or computer vision is earning in Sydney right now, and what they’ll want in equity.
- Whether your role is really an ML Engineer, an Applied Scientist, an AI Engineer or a Data Scientist with ambition, because the title changes who applies and what you’ll pay.
- Which Sydney and Melbourne teams have just finished a big AI project, which means their best people are restless.
- Why your job ad is attracting course graduates and not practitioners, and the three lines to change.

Meet the desk

Keiran Hathorn founded Big Wave Digital in 2010. Close to 30 years in recruitment, technical support before that, and before that a stint dealing cards to high rollers at Sydney’s casino. He says it taught him pattern recognition. We think it taught him patience with people who bluff. He takes your brief personally, interviews every candidate personally, and will tell you early if the budget and the wish list need to have a chat.

Jules Semmens runs the parallel search. While Keiran is deep in interviews, Jules is mapping the market, chasing the people who haven’t replied and keeping the whole thing moving. Two people, one role, no queue.

Big Wave Digital. The whale is in the name. We go deep.

The trophy shelf, briefly

Awards don’t ship models,



but they do tell you we’ve been doing this a while and people have noticed:

- SEEK SARA Award, Best Small Recruitment Agency (Technology), Winner
- SEEK SARA Award, Best Small Recruitment Agency (Technology), Runner Up, twice
- AIMIA Awards, Best Business Website, Finalist
- Recruitment International, Best Recruitment Company to Work For, Finalist
- JobAdvisor Top 10 Coolest SME Companies to Work For
- 2026 Randwick City Business Excellence Awards, Finalist

The stat we’d rather you remember is 89 percent. That’s how many of our clients come back for the next hire.

Why us

Because an ML engineer search done badly costs you six months and a bruised employer brand, and done well it changes what your company can build. Because we interview everyone before you see them, including the awkward questions about current comp, notice, visas and whether they’re already interviewing at the company next door. Because you’ll deal with the two people doing the actual work from the first call to the signed contract.

And because we’re honest about what we can’t do. If your budget is a senior ML engineer and your brief is a research scientist with a PhD and five papers, we’ll say so on day one, not day forty.

How it works

1. Call or email Keiran. Twenty minutes on the problem you’re solving, the data you have, the stack and the money.
2. We tell you straight whether we can fill it, how long it’ll take and what it’ll cost.
3. Within days, a short list of three to five people who can genuinely do the work and genuinely want to do it at your company.
4. We run the process end to end, including the offer and the inevitable counter offer, and you get an ML engineer who starts.

Grab the slot

Hiring a Machine Learning Engineer in Sydney? Email ******@bigwavedigital.com.au, call +61 2 9380 4431, or connect with us here.

Tell us what you’re building. We’ll tell you who in Sydney could build it.

Big Wave Digital. Sydney’s specialist AI, technology and digital marketing recruiters since 2010. One machine learning search slot open now.

📌 Machine Learning Engineer: Python, PyTorch & LLMs | Sydney | Need One Hired? Yes, We Have Capacity Now
🏢 Big Wave Digital
📍 Sydney