Minimum of 1 AI Engineer

1. AI Engineers are primarily responsible for the implementation of AI models and algorithms. Working under the guidance of more experienced professionals they contribute to the design, testing, and deployment of AI solutions. NOTE: This is a new role to APS Career Pathfinder and we are still consulting on the skills requirement.

2. Services Australia is seeking to procure AI Engineer / Developer (APS6 equivalent) with demonstratable experience with AI on-premise platforms to play a pivotal role in delivering complex application development projects on platforms across the Technology and Digital Program (TDP) Group that align with the agency’s strategic objectives.

3. The position requires a seasoned professional with extensive experience and expertise in AI Engineering capabilities, including AI workload migrations, deployment and operations.

4. As an AI Engineer / Developer (APS6 equivalent), you will specialise in on-premises cloud-native tooling, with the capability to design, implement, and optimise environments from new (greenfield) implementations as well as enhance existing setups (brownfield). This role is focused on applying secure-by-design architectures, incorporating reusable patterns and Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to deliver scalable, compliant solutions in line with APS frameworks and regulations.

5. You will collaborate with Data Scientists, Architecture, Cyber Security, and Core data teams in the group to establish foundational platform capability and frameworks, enforce governance, and apply best practices across networking and resource management in your primary platform

6. The AI Engineer / Developer (APS6 equivalent) is expected to operate with a significant degree of independence with a high level of autonomy, while also maintaining close working relationships with key stakeholders and strict adherence to agency processes and procedures.

7. In performing the role, the candidate will be required to identify and drive innovation, manage and lead change, and has an active role in contributing to and implementing the agency’s strategic direction with decision-making and advice to others highly dependent on their own judgement.

8. The AI Engineer / Developer (APS6 equivalent) is vital in ensuring that Services Australia effectively leverages technology to enhance service delivery and meet the needs of the government, the Agency and the community.

9. The AI Engineer / Developer (APS6 equivalent) develops, describes and influences technology outcomes and supports program and project deliverables.

10. Excellent problem-solving, communication, and leadership skills in a collaborative environment.

Key duties

Duties may include some or all of the following:

1. create software and technical designs for the realisation of complex development solutions

2. develop high-quality code and long-term maintenance of a product's code base

3. provide technical advice on software development and maintenance

4. provide go-live support and maintenance for complex developments

5. perform a range of analysis, design, software development, prototyping, unit testing and maintenance activities

6. undertake analysis of technical requirements to support project evaluation with proposed solutions

7. ensure compliance with endorsed software development methodologies

8. identify, investigate, and resolve complex ICT issues

9. assess, communicate, monitor, and control risk

10. develop team plans and goals

11. prepare draft reports and corporate documentation

12. manage and prioritise own and others' workloads to meet business objectives in specified timeframes

13. develop and deliver on projects within the assigned area of responsibility

14. perform cost analysis activities as required

15. act with integrity by promoting workplace practices aligned with the APS Values and the APS Code of Conduct.

16. exercise appropriate delegation in accordance with legislations and guidelines

Technical skills

1. 5+ years of hands-on experience as an AI Engineer, including solution design, implementation and operation of greenfield and brownfield AI/ML environments across on-premises, public cloud and hybrid platforms.

2. Experience in Kubernetes, OpenShift and OpenShift AI, including namespaces, RBAC, operators, CRDs, deployments, services, ingress/routes, secrets, config maps, workbenches, custom images, AI Pipelines/Kubeflow, model registry, model catalogue, model serving, distributed workloads and monitoring.

3. Experience in containers and platform engineering, including Docker/Podman, container image creation, registries, image scanning, vulnerability management, container security and secure software supply chain practices.

4. Experience in Linux administration, networking and storage, including DNS, TLS, proxies, load balancing, ingress, firewall concepts, certificates, scripting and connectivity between on-premises and cloud environments.

5. Experience in DevOps, CI/CD and Infrastructure as Code, including Git, GitLab/GitHub/Azure DevOps, Tekton, GitOps/Argo CD, Terraform and/or Ansible, and automated build, test and deployment pipelines.

6. Experience in Python and scripting for automation, AI/ML integration, APIs, platform tooling and operational support.

7. Experience in AI/ML engineering and MLOps, including model lifecycle management, training, inference, evaluation, registration, deployment, monitoring, model optimisation and automated model build-and-release processes.

8. Experience in LLM and Generative AI tooling, including vLLM/TGI or equivalent, Hugging Face, LLM APIs, embeddings, Retrieval-Augmented Generation, vector databases, prompt/evaluation tooling, AI agents and foundation models.

9. Experience in GPU engineering, including NVIDIA GPUs, CUDA fundamentals, GPU scheduling and resource allocation, GPU utilisation and troubleshooting.

10. Experience in APIs and enterprise integration, including REST APIs, authentication, OAuth/OIDC, API gateways, service-to-service integration, streaming platforms, data lakes and feature stores.

11. Experience in object storage and data management, including S3-compatible storage for OpenShift AI pipelines, models and datasets.

12. Experience in observability and operational monitoring, including Prometheus/Grafana, logs, metrics, tracing and model/application monitoring.

13. Experience in security, governance and compliance, including RBAC, secrets, certificates, network policies, vulnerability scanning, DevSecOps, data sovereignty, security classifications, privacy obligations and Australian Government regulatory requirements.

14. Proven ability to articulate complex technical concepts clearly, facilitate stakeholder discussions and drive consensus on alignment with project and organisational goals.