Principal AI Engineer and Technical Lead (AI)

Location: Melbourne preferred; candidates elsewhere in Australia considered. Exceptional candidates may be considered within about two hours of Australian Eastern Time. Regular on-site presence at client locations is required.

Company

hirify.global is a boutique data and AI consultancy delivering data platforms, analytics, machine-learning, and AI agent solutions for mid-market and enterprise clients.

What you will do

• Own technical architecture and end-to-end delivery across data foundations, machine-learning models, optimization, and validation evidence.
• Act as the technical face of client engagements, leading methodology reviews, steering sessions, and executive readouts.
• Lead a pod of machine-learning and data engineers while setting standards for code review, testing, reproducibility, and documentation.
• Build and operate large-scale production data pipelines on Google Cloud Platform and BigQuery across billions of rows.
• Design and validate propensity, uplift, visitation-frequency, offer-adoption, forecasting, and optimization models.
• Apply causal inference, experimentation, mixed-integer and linear programming, assignment methods, and scheduling techniques in production.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience building and shipping production data and machine-learning systems, including technical or team leadership.
• Deep hands-on Python and SQL experience with production data engineering on a major cloud platform.
• Experience with causal inference, uplift modeling, difference-in-differences, double machine learning, holdout design, experimentation, and power analysis.
• Experience with mathematical optimization, including mixed-integer or linear programming and assignment or scheduling problems.
• Client-facing delivery experience with the ability to communicate with senior executives and external delivery partners.
• Must have the right to work in Australia or be based within about two hours of Australian Eastern Time.

Nice to have

• Experience with agentic workflows, LLM integration, recommendation systems, or marketing and offer optimization.
• Gaming, casino, hospitality, loyalty, workforce optimization, or responsible-gaming experience.
• Experience with vendor integrations, anti-money-laundering, privacy-by-design, consulting, or client-embedded delivery.

Culture & Benefits

• Flexible hybrid working arrangements around the engagement's on-site requirements.
• Lead role on a high-visibility engagement with direct access to client executives and senior stakeholders.
• Opportunity to establish the founding technical presence for hirify.global in Australia.
• Competitive compensation with a performance-based bonus.
• Professional development budget and certification support.

Hiring process

• Submit a resume and application materials in English.