Senior AI Engineer
Preacta Recruitment · Melbourne VIC ·
- Work mode
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Senior
- Category
- AI engineering
The Opportunity
We're working with a fast-growing, well-backed Melbourne AI startup building an agentic platform that onboards software users in real time, guiding people through products the way a great support engineer would, at scale. The founders previously built and scaled a security product to acquisition, and they've brought much of that founding team across to build this one.
This is a startup with real product-market fit already forming, a small engineering team, and founders who are still hands-on in the code and the roadmap. There's a lot of ground still to cover, and the people joining now will shape how the platform's agentic core actually works, not inherit someone else's architecture.
What You'll Be Working On
Depending on level, you'll be building and owning pieces of the agent stack that power the onboarding product: agent orchestration and tooling, the logic that decides what a user needs to see next, and the systems that let the platform reliably do useful things rather than just demo well.
At Senior and Principal level, this means genuine agentic build experience: designing agent architectures, understanding failure modes, and knowing where LLMs are dependable versus where they need guardrails. At Mid level, we're open to strong engineers without production agent experience, provided they've genuinely explored the space through personal projects and understand how LLMs and RAG-style systems actually work under the hood.
What We're Looking For
We're working with a fast-growing, well-backed Melbourne AI startup building an agentic platform that onboards software users in real time, guiding people through products the way a great support engineer would, at scale. The founders previously built and scaled a security product to acquisition, and they've brought much of that founding team across to build this one.
This is a startup with real product-market fit already forming, a small engineering team, and founders who are still hands-on in the code and the roadmap. There's a lot of ground still to cover, and the people joining now will shape how the platform's agentic core actually works, not inherit someone else's architecture.
What You'll Be Working On
Depending on level, you'll be building and owning pieces of the agent stack that power the onboarding product: agent orchestration and tooling, the logic that decides what a user needs to see next, and the systems that let the platform reliably do useful things rather than just demo well.
At Senior and Principal level, this means genuine agentic build experience: designing agent architectures, understanding failure modes, and knowing where LLMs are dependable versus where they need guardrails. At Mid level, we're open to strong engineers without production agent experience, provided they've genuinely explored the space through personal projects and understand how LLMs and RAG-style systems actually work under the hood.
What We're Looking For
- Strong, provable Python engineering fundamentals — this is non-negotiable across every level
- For Senior/Principal: hands-on experience building and shipping agentic systems in production, not just prototyping with an API key
- For Mid level: real curiosity about AI systems and LLM capability/limitations, even if gained outside a job
- A background in product-focused, consumer-facing software rather than heavy enterprise or corporate environments — you'll fit better here if you've built things people actually use daily
- Comfortable in a startup environment: fewer layers, more ownership, and direct access to founders
- Experience at a company that scaled from startup to a larger, well-known outcome
- Front-end experience with Svelte or a similar modern framework
- A track record of moving from a large, established company into a startup environment