We’re looking for a hands-on builder, someone who thinks like a data engineer or software developer first, and a data scientist second.
This is a 12-month initial contract based in Melbourne, with strong potential to extend, working within a large enterprise environment delivering real AI capability at scale.
This role sits at the intersection of AI, data engineering and software development, focused on building production-grade AI systems from the ground up. You won’t be handing off notebooks, you’ll be owning problems end-to-end, from messy raw data through to deployed, scalable solutions.
The work centres around LLMs, NLP, recommendation systems and modern AI pipelines, all within an enterprise Azure environment. If you enjoy building robust systems, writing clean code, and shipping solutions that actually get used, this is for you.
This is: what you’ll do
- Design and build end-to-end AI and data pipelines, from ingestion through to production deployment
- Develop embedding-based search and recommendation systems, including vector databases and similarity search
- Build and deploy NLP and LLM pipelines to extract insights from unstructured data
- Write production-quality, scalable code, not one-off scripts or notebooks
- Own and maintain data and ML infrastructure, including orchestration, monitoring and reliability
- Implement MLOps practices such as CI/CD, model monitoring, drift detection and retraining
- Work closely with stakeholders to translate technical solutions into real business impact
- Contribute to engineering standards, code quality and system design across the team
- 5+ years’ experience in a hands-on role spanning data engineering, ML engineering or software development
- Strong programming skills in Python, with a focus on writing clean, production-ready code
- Strong proficiency in the modern AI and ML stack including PyTorch or TensorFlow, HuggingFace Transformers, scikit-learn, pandas and related tools
- Proven experience building data pipelines and production ML systems, not just models
- Experience with embeddings, vector search, recommendation systems or RAG architectures
- Strong experience with NLP and or LLM-based solutions
- Hands-on experience with data engineering tools such as Spark, Databricks, Airflow or similar
- Experience working with Azure cloud services including Azure ML, Azure OpenAI, Synapse or similar
- Solid understanding of software engineering practices including Git, CI/CD, testing and code reviews
- Ability to operate independently and take ownership of complex technical problems
- Build real, production AI systems, not just proofs of concept
- Work with modern AI technologies including LLMs, embeddings and vector search
- High-impact role influencing how AI is delivered at enterprise scale
- Join a team that values engineering quality, ownership and delivery
Apply with purpose. Be part of a placement that gives back. For every role we fill, we donate to a charity of the client’s choice. We’ve surpassed $1 million donated and we’re just getting started.
This is: what’s next
Apply now or reach out to:
Louis Asser
Consultant, Natural Selection Group
M: 0480 771 256
E: louis.asser@naturalselectiongroup.com.au