Job Description

Work with cutting edge AI technology, making the world a safer and more secure place. DroneShield (ASX:DRO) offers an opportunity to solve some of world’s most challenging technical problems in the rapidly growing counterdrone sector. Our customers are militaries, government agencies, airports, critical infrastructure, law enforcement and many others.

With one of the largest listed defence company market capitalisations in Australia, part of the ASX200 index, and having raised approximately $250m in 2024 alone, DroneShield is undergoing hypergrowth stage, fuelled by rapidly increasing use of drones for nefarious applications, from battlefield, to terrorism, to contraband delivery and commercial espionage.

This role is in the DroneShield Sydney headquarters in Sydney CBD. There are approximately 400 staff based in the 4,000sqm facility today, scheduled to grow to approximately 500 staff by end of 2026. Overseas on the ground presence includes Virginia (USA), Netherlands, Denmark, Mexico and Dubai, as well as distributors in over 70 countries globally.

About the role

DroneShield is seeking an AI/ML Engineer to join our growing team in Sydney, Australia. Reporting to the SensorFusionAI (SFAI) Team Lead, you will play a key role in developing multi-sensor AI models that contribute towards sensor fusion or provide real-time actionable intelligence to end users across defence, security and critical infrastructure domains.

Responsibilities, Duties and Expectations

• Develop, maintain, finetune and extend existing MLOps pipelines and frameworks.
• Develop model benchmarking frameworks and evaluate model performance on curated datasets and real-world test cases.
• Work closely with software engineers to integrate and optimise ML models for inference within DroneShield’s production systems.
• Monitor and optimise model performance post-deployment, investigating issues and driving continuous improvement.
• Write clean, maintainable, and well-documented code, following modern software engineering and AI/ML best practices (testing, CI/CD, code reviews).
• Contribute to the long-term AI/ML roadmap of DroneShield’s world-class counter-drone solutions.
• Collaborate with data engineers to support data collection, ETL and annotation workflows.

Qualifications, Experience and Skills

• Bachelor’s degree (or higher) in Computer Science, Data Science, Artificial Intelligence, or a related technical field or equivalent practical experience
• Minimum of 3 years of professional, hands-on experience developing, training, and deploying machine learning models, including traditional, deep learning, and attention-based transformer architectures
• Proficiency in Python; knowledge of at least one object-oriented programming language (e.g. Go, C++) is favourable
• Strong experience with ML frameworks such as PyTorch or TensorFlow, and familiarity with model optimization and conversion tools (e.g. ONNX)
• Proven experience designing and implementing end-to-end MLOps pipelines, using tools such as ClearML
• Experience with CUDA, distributed or real-time inference systems and GPU acceleration pipelines
• Strong understanding of model evaluation, metrics, conversion and inference optimization across various platforms
• Familiarity with containerization and orchestration using Docker
• Proficiency in Linux-based development and runtime environments
• Experience designing and implementing automated CI/CD workflows is favourable
• Background in SQL databases or basic front-end (React) development is advantageous

Who you are

• You are a self-driven learner, always seeking to improve and stay at the forefront of your field.
• You excel in fast-paced, mission-critical environments with a strong sense of purpose.
• You are a clear communicator capable of bridging technical and non-technical discussions.
• You are collaborative and team-oriented, contributing positively to shared problem solving.
• You take ownership of your work, driving solutions from concept to deployment.
• You are proactive in influencing technical direction and contributing to strategic decisions.

Note for recruitment agencies: We do not accept unsolicited candidates from external recruiters unless specifically instructed.