AI Lead – Enterprise AI Architecture, Governance & Innovation (Higher Education)

Firesoft People | Sydney, NSW | Hybrid / flexible

- $1,200 – $1,400 per day GST, depending on experience and commitment
- Initial 3-month contract, strong likelihood of extension to 6 months and beyond
- 3 to 5 days per week
- Start: November / early December 2026

A leading Australian university has committed to AI with ambition and needs someone who lives and breathes it to lead the next phase. You’ll be the university’s senior AI practitioner: advising the leadership group, setting architecture and guardrails, and driving initiatives across the institution.

This is a role for a hands-on AI leader: part advisor, part builder, part governor.

What you’ll own

- Advisory – Be the trusted AI voice to the leadership group: explicit recommendations, honest trade-offs, and the judgement to say what not to do.
- Architecture & build – Set the target-state enterprise AI architecture, reference patterns and secure integration standards; design and guide the first pilots through to production.
- Governance & guardrails – Put practical controls in place: acceptable use, privacy, security, risk and technology approvals. Ensure staff and students get access to AI the right access to the right content with usage visibility and permission-aware grounding (e.g. Glean, Nebuly, Microsoft Purview/Copilot controls).
- Resilience & sovereignty – Design for a shifting landscape: model-agnostic patterns, Australian data residency, and the ability to pivot quickly if a vendor, model or capability is withdrawn or restricted.
- Build vs buy – Lead independent,



evidence-based evaluations of platforms, LLMs and vendor solutions: pros and cons, cost, value and ROI, exit options.
- Vendor management – Hold vendors to account on roadmap, security and value.
- Capability – Lift the university’s AI maturity through mentoring, patterns and knowledge transfer.

Must have

- Deep, current, hands-on Generative and Agentic AI experience: RAG, multi-agent orchestration, guardrails, evaluation, observability delivered in an enterprise, not a lab
- Microsoft AI stack: Azure OpenAI / AI Foundry, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio, with Entra-based identity and access control
- Experience establishing AI governance aligned to recognised frameworks (ISO/IEC 42001, NIST AI RMF, Australian AI Ethics Principles) and translating it into controls people actually follow
- Strong solutions or enterprise architecture foundation across cloud, data, integration and security
- Proven ability to advise senior leaders and drive cross-organisational initiatives

Strongly preferred

- Higher-education or public-sector experience, including TEQSA guidance on GenAI, student/research data sensitivities and NSW privacy obligations
- Experience running structured build-vs-buy and vendor evaluations (RFI/RFP/POC) with ROI analysis
- Familiarity with AI usage analytics and permission-aware enterprise search tooling

If you want to shape how a whole university adopts AI and build some of it yourself message me for a confidential discussion, or share this with someone who should see it.

#AILead #EnterpriseAI #AIGovernance #GenerativeAI #AzureOpenAI #HigherEducation #ContractJobs

📌 Head of Artificial Intelligence (Sydney)
🏢 FIRESOFT People
📍 Sydney