Lead AI Engineer

Lead AI Engineer

Innova Search | Sydney, New South Wales, Australia (Hybrid)

About the Business

Innova are working exclusively with a well-established Australian business that is making significant investment in AI and technology. With strong executive buy-in and real operational problems to solve, they are now building out their AI capability from the ground up.

The Opportunity

This is a rare opportunity to join as the organisation's first AI hire, reporting directly to the CTO and collaborating closely with the Head of Data. You will take ownership of the entire AI function, spanning architecture and build through to team growth and stakeholder engagement.

The immediate focus is on replacing manual, labour-intensive processes with intelligent automation, with a longer-term ambition to turn these capabilities into client-facing products. You will have the freedom to set direction, select tooling, and define how AI gets built and adopted across the business.

What You’ll Be Doing

Hands-On Engineering

• Design, build, and deploy end-to-end production AI systems including agentic workflows, RAG pipelines, LLM-powered automation, and intelligent document processing.
• Architect autonomous agents that connect into existing business systems, pulling data, executing quality checks, and producing outputs with minimal manual oversight.
• Build robust evaluation frameworks to assess accuracy, reliability, and cost-efficiency of AI solutions in live environments.
• Develop reusable patterns and reference architectures capable of scaling as the business grows.
• Embed AI capabilities into current workflows and client-facing services.
• Work primarily within the Microsoft/Azure ecosystem, with flexibility to choose the right LLM provider for each use case.

Leadership & Strategy

• Partner with the CTO to define and evolve the AI roadmap, translating business challenges into clear technical solutions.
• Build and lead a small engineering team (initially 2–3 people, growing over time), including hiring, onboarding, and day-to-day mentoring.
• Engage with senior leaders and operational teams to understand workflows, demonstrate AI-driven solutions, and support adoption.
• Establish engineering standards, development practices, and governance frameworks that will underpin the AI function going forward.

What We’re Looking For

Essential Experience

• Demonstrated track record of building and shipping production AI/LLM systems.
• Practical experience delivering agentic AI workflows using frameworks such as LangGraph, LangChain, Semantic Kernel, AutoGen, or similar.
• Strong command of RAG implementation covering embedding strategies, chunking approaches, retrieval optimisation, evaluation pipelines, and vector database management.
• Hands-on experience across AI platforms such as Azure AI Foundry, AWS Bedrock, or Google Vertex (Azure preferred).
• Strong software engineering fundamentals; preference for C# and .NET.
• Experience with cloud infrastructure, API design, and CI/CD tooling (Azure DevOps or GitHub Actions).
• Solid grounding in data engineering: pipeline design, data quality management, and integration patterns.
• Ability to communicate technical concepts clearly to non-technical audiences.
• A track record of delivering AI solutions that have driven measurable commercial outcomes.

Highly Regarded

• Background in financial services, regulated industries, or professional services / consulting.
• MLOps/LLMOps experience including model lifecycle management, monitoring, cost control, and deployment automation.
• Familiarity with AI security, governance, and responsible AI frameworks.
• Knowledge of MCP for tool integration.
• Experience turning internal AI tools into client-facing products or services.
• Prior experience building a team or function from the ground up.

What’s on Offer

• Competitive salary package, flexible based on experience.
• Direct access to the CTO with no layers of bureaucracy between you and the decision-maker.
• A genuine greenfield build where you define the patterns, choose the tools, and set the standards.
• Live, meaningful use cases waiting to be solved from day one; this is not a research mandate.
• The financial stability of an established business combined with the autonomy of founding a new function.
• Hybrid working from Sydney; open to candidates in Melbourne or Brisbane, and potentially remote within Australia.

Why This Role

This is not a role where you will be managing vendors or reviewing other people’s code. You’ll be in production, writing code, making architecture decisions, and building things that matter.

For the right person, this is the opportunity to become the foundational AI leader inside a growing organisation, with the executive support, real problems, and creative freedom to do it properly from day one.

How to Apply

To be considered, you must be based in Australia with full working rights. Sponsorship is not available for this role.

This search is managed exclusively by Innova. Apply directly and Lewis Heeks will be in touch with suitable candidates promptly. All enquiries are handled in strict confidence.

About Innova

Innova is a technology search firm based in Australia. We operate across software, product, architecture, data and AI, from executive appointments through to the delivery teams. Every search is founder-led by a specialist in the function being hired.