Lead AI Engineer

We're hipages, Australia's #1 digital platform connecting homeowners with trusted tradies. As an ASX-listed tech company, we're on a mission to transform the trade industry and improve lives. With teams across Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines and Vietnam, we work as one team with a shared purpose.

We're proud to be a certified Great Place to Work and WORK180's #1 Employer for Women. At hipages, you'll find real impact, career growth and a workplace where everyone belongs.

About the role

This is a technical role. You'll turn frontier models into agentic features that add value to our customers, think an AI receptionist, assisted quoting, pricing guidance and build the shared AI service, evals and guardrails they run on. This is an exciting role: half hands-on shipping AI products, half setting the AI direction for the rest of the Engineering team.

Why join our Engineering team?

• Hybrid working model
• Competitive salary, benefits, and everyday discounts
• In-house Talent Development team to prioritise personal and career growth
• Cross-functional collaboration
• Hands-on learning opportunities and workshops for continuous upskilling

How you will add value

• Ship real agentic AI in production: think an AI receptionist, assisted quoting, and pricing guidance that tradies pay a premium for, not a demo that dies in a slide deck.
• Build the AI platform everyone else builds on: a shared service with unified model access, cost tracking, tracing and guardrails, engineered so the right path is the easy path.
• Make evals your quality gate: rigorous offline and online evaluation for non-deterministic systems, with real authority to block a release when it doesn't clear the bar.
• Own the hard economics of AI at scale: model selection, latency, cost, observability, and the guardrails that keep free-form AI safe in production.
• Exercise real judgment: know when a deterministic solution beats an agent, and have the standing to kill features that don't earn their keep.
• Set the technical direction: shape the team's agentic architecture, mentor and pair with engineers who want to level up, and become the evidence-based AI voice hipages Engineering, Product and Design turn to.

About you

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with recent hands-on experience shipping and operating AI-powered product features in production.
• Production depth in LLM application patterns, prompt/context engineering, RAG, tool use, structured outputs, MCP, and agentic patterns, with the judgment to know when a simpler approach beats an agent.
• You've built offline and online evaluation for non-deterministic systems, and used it as a real release gate.
• Experience operating AI (or comparable high-scale services) in production, observability, tracing, and latency/cost control at scale.
• A track record of building shared services or paved-road tooling other engineers chose to adopt.
• Working knowledge of responsible-AI practices, guardrails, PII safety, hallucination mitigation, human-in-the-loop.
• Cloud experience, ideally AWS.
• Excellent communication, you can explain AI capabilities and limits to product, design and executive stakeholders, and enjoy uplifting other engineers.

Nice to have:

• Amazon Bedrock (Agents, Guardrails) and/or Claude Code and agentic engineering workflows.
• Multi-agent orchestration patterns, sequential, concurrent, handoff with any modern agent framework.
• Production observability/tracing for LLM systems (e.g. Langfuse, Arize, Honeycomb, OpenTelemetry).
• Experience building MCP servers and agent skills.
• TypeScript depth though adaptability across languages matters more.

Life at hipages

We're more than just a workplace. We're a place where you can be yourself, do great work and grow your career. Recognised as a Great Place to Work, our inclusive, supportive culture helps people thrive.

You'll use the best tools and tech, with real impact on our products and customers. We invest in your development and lead with coaching, not micromanagement – it's why 85% of our team say their leader is great.

And there's more:

• Diverse, collaborative teams that love solving problems
• Agile squads, hackathons, off-sites and roadshows
• Extra leave for birthdays, volunteering, and more
• Healthy snacks, continental breakfast and fresh fruit
• Sydney CBD office near Town Hall and Gadigal Stations
• Tailored growth support, mentoring and stretch projects
• A vibrant social scene - we work hard and have fun doing it

We prioritise Diversity

At hipages, innovation and collaboration thrive in diverse and inclusive teams. We don't expect you to know everything - we care more about who you are as a person, a team member, and a leader. We're proud to be endorsed by WORK180 for supporting women's careers and we value diversity across culture, age, gender identity and sexual orientation.

Research shows that men often apply when they meet just 60% of the criteria, while women and minority groups wait until they tick every box. If you think you'd be a great fit - even if you don't meet every requirement - we'd love to hear from you.

We're also a Circle Back Initiative Employer, which means we commit to responding to every applicant.

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