Senior AI Engineer

Job description

Our Why

Datacom works with organisations and communities across Australia and New Zealand to make a difference in people’s lives and help organisations use the power of tech to innovate and grow.

About the Role (your why)

As an AI Engineer – Apps (Senior IC), you will lead the development and operation of backend services that power agentic interactions and content ingestion at scale.

You will:

• Own service-level outcomes (reliability, performance, cost) and drive continuous improvement through observability and incident learnings.
  
  

• Apply sound architectural boundaries and interface contracts to enable safe evolution, testability, and provider interchangeability.
  
  

• Implement secure-by-default patterns for identity, access, secrets, and data protection, aligned to company standards and regulatory requirements.
  
  

• Partner with product, design, and platform teams to deliver iteratively, balancing speed and quality through automation and testing.
  
  

• Mentor peers, uphold engineering practices, and contribute to technical direction within your domain.
  
  

Your impact is measured by service SLOs, developer productivity, security posture, and the value unlocked for customers through AI-enabled features.

This overview is stack-agnostic and focuses on outcomes; specific technologies may evolve over time.

What you’ll do

• Analyse product and software requirements, refining work packages and technical designs in line with company methodology, style, quality, and architectural guardrails.
  
  

• Design, build, and evolve backend APIs and services with clear contracts, versioning strategies, pagination, and schema evolution.
  
  

• Implement resilient content ingestion pipelines (e.g., feeds, documents, web content) with scheduling, retries, backoff, deduplication, and idempotency.
  
  

• Integrate AI capabilities (e.g., embeddings, reranking, completions) through well-abstracted interfaces to support provider interchangeability.
  
  

• Engineer for reliability: apply rate limiting, circuit breaking, graceful degradation, timeouts, and robust error handling; participate in incident response and post-incident improvements.
  
  

• Own observability: instrument services with distributed tracing, metrics, and structured logging; define and improve SLOs and SLIs.

• Write high-quality automated tests (unit, integration, contract) and maintain CI/CD pipelines to ensure safe, frequent releases.
  
  

• Implement secure-by-design patterns (AuthN/AuthZ, least privilege, secrets management, data protection in transit/at rest) and ensure compliance with policy.
  
  

• Operate services in cloud-native environments (containers, orchestration, IaC), including capacity planning, cost awareness, and change management.
  
  

• Collaborate cross-functionally with product management, design, data, and platform teams; provide technical guidance to junior engineers and peers.
  
  

• Contribute to proposals, estimates, and roadmaps; identify opportunities for innovation, reuse, and potential IP.
  
  

Scope and Decision Rights

• Own service architecture and technical design within domain boundaries; propose and drive architectural changes through established governance.
  
  

• Select libraries and patterns within platform guardrails; define interface contracts and versioning approaches.
  
  

• Set and maintain service SLOs/SLIs and error budgets; lead incident response for owned services.
  
  

• Prioritise technical debt and operational improvements alongside product work.
  
  

Success Metrics

• SLOs consistently met (availability, latency, error rates) with transparent SLI reporting.
  
  

• MTTR reduced and incident recurrence prevented via actionable post-incident reviews.
  
  

• Secure defaults: critical findings remediated within SLA; secrets and identities managed per policy.
  
  

• Change success rate and deployment frequency improved without increasing failure rates.
  
  

• Meaningful developer productivity gains (e.g., test coverage, lead time, flaky test reduction) and measurable AI feature impact on product goals.
  
  

What you’ll bring

Essential

• Deep knowledge of software design and performance engineering, including profiling, capacity, and scaling patterns.
  
  

• Strong experience building and operating APIs and event/data pipelines in production at scale.
  
  

• Proficiency with modern DevOps practices: CI/CD, infrastructure as code, containerisation, and cloud operations.
  
  

• Demonstrated application of clean architecture principles (e.g., ports/adapters), interface contracts, and testability.
  
  

• Solid observability skills: distributed tracing, metrics, structured logging, and service-level objectives.
  
  

• Security-first mindset: authentication/authorization, least privilege, secret management, data protection, and secure coding.
  
  

• Excellent communication, stakeholder management, and the ability to align technical solutions with business outcomes.
  
  

• Proven analytical and problem-solving skills; exercises sound judgment in ambiguous environments.
  
  

Desirable

• Experience integrating with LLM/AI services for embeddings, retrieval, reranking, and completions, including streaming responses.
  
  

• Building large-scale document ingestion and enrichment (extraction, chunking, semantic metadata) and content versioning.
  
  

• Event-driven architectures, background task orchestration, and scheduler design.
  
  

• Policy-based authorization modelling and claims mapping.
  
  

• Performance tuning and high-throughput async or concurrent service design.
  
  

Why join us here at Datacom?

Datacom is one of Australia and New Zealand’s largest suppliers of Information Technology professional services.

We have managed to maintain a dynamic, agile, small business feel that is often diluted in larger organisations of our size.

It's our people that give Datacom its unique culture and energy that you can feel from the moment you meet with us.

We care about our people and provide a range of perks such as social events, chill-out spaces, remote working, flexi-hours and professional development courses to name a few.

You’ll have the opportunity to learn, develop your career, connect and bring your true self to work.

You will be recognised and valued for your contributions and be able to do your work in a collegial, flat-structured environment.

We operate at the forefront of technology to help Australia and New Zealand’s largest enterprise organisations explore possibilities and solve their greatest challenges, so you will never run out of interesting new challenges and opportunities.

We want Datacom to be an inclusive and welcoming workplace for everyone and take pride in the steps we have taken and continue to take to make our environment fun and friendly, and our people feel supported.

Required Skill Profession

Database, Analytics & Bi