Job Description

This is a full-time position based in Brisbane, with the flexibility to be based from our Sydney office for the right candidate.

Hello. We’re Virgin Australia. We’re the airline that’s always done things a little different. Our way. The Virgin way. We’re on a mission to make flying better than ‘nice’. And to do that, it takes a team of talented people who are passionate about customer experience, doing the right thing always, with a focus on safety – in the air, on the ground and in our workplaces. A team who values real diversity and inclusion, in a big brand with big ambitions.

What you’ll be doing

As a Senior AI Engineer, you'll play a critical role in helping shape Virgin Australia's AI future.

Joining our growing AI team, you'll lead the design, development and operation of production-grade AI systems that deliver meaningful outcomes for our customers, our people and our business. This is an opportunity to work on greenfield AI initiatives, helping take AI solutions from concept through to production while establishing engineering standards and best practices across the function.

Reporting to the Lead Engineer, AI, you'll provide hands-on technical leadership across AI engineering initiatives and work closely with Product, Data Science, Platform Engineering, Security, Architecture and business stakeholders to deliver reliable, scalable and secure AI services.

In this role, you will:

• Lead the technical design and development of AI applications, agentic workflows, retrieval pipelines, tool-calling systems and AI-enabled services
• Design and build production-grade APIs, integrations, agent gateways, knowledge stores, retrieval flows and AI platforms
• Partner with Product, Data Science and business teams to translate business needs into practical AI solutions
• Establish and champion engineering standards across code quality, testing, observability, evaluation, security and production readiness
• Mentor and coach AI Engineers, contributing to technical capability uplift across the team
• Design and implement evaluation frameworks, monitoring, regression testing and quality controls for AI systems
• Drive best practice across LLMOps, AgentOps, observability and release management
• Support incident response, root-cause analysis and continuous improvement for production AI services
• Contribute to responsible AI practices, including evaluation, guardrails, human escalation and governance controls

This is a highly visible role that combines hands-on engineering with technical leadership and offers the opportunity to influence how AI is embedded across one of Australia's most recognised brands.

You'll be great in this role if you have...

• Strong hands-on experience delivering production software and cloud-based systems in a ‘forward deployed engineer’ style role
• Experience building and deploying AI, LLM, RAG, agentic or tool-calling solutions in production environments
• Strong Python development skills and experience with modern API frameworks such as FastAPI
• Experience designing and implementing multi-agent AI workflows, including Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations
• Experience designing APIs, services, integrations, retrieval systems and data pipelines
• Strong understanding of software engineering best practices, including testing, CI/CD, code quality and maintainability
• Experience leading technical design and making pragmatic architectural trade-offs
• Experience mentoring engineers and contributing to engineering capability uplift
• Strong communication skills with the ability to explain technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Experience working across cross-functional teams including Product, Engineering, Data Science and Security

Desirable

• Experience with AWS AgentCore and Strands.
• Experience implementing observability, monitoring and evaluation frameworks for AI systems.
• Experience with experimentation platforms, A/B testing and canary releases.
• Exposure to React and TypeScript

Why join us?

You'll be joining Virgin Australia at a pivotal point in our AI journey. This is an opportunity to help build AI capability from the ground up, working on strategically important initiatives with strong executive sponsorship and investment.

You'll work alongside talented engineers, data scientists and business leaders while helping establish the platforms, standards and solutions that will shape the future of AI across the organisation.

We’re committed to looking after you, with some of the best benefits and conditions in the industry – including (but not limited to):

• Discounted flights for you and your loved ones (including $1000 worth of travel credits per year)
• A flexible, hybrid work style. Work from home or the office, adapt your location to suit your style and needs
• One of Brisbane’s most admired head office locations, with South Bank train station, a supermarket, pharmacy, and lunch options downstairs plus a 5-minute walk to the Busway, a rooftop restaurant and onsite gym (with a low membership fee) and South Bank Parklands just across the road
• Discounts on travel insurance, lounge membership, car hire, accommodation, and experiences worldwide
• Cheaper hospitality, retail, technology, beauty and wellness services
• Free counselling and access to a well-being app to support your physical, mental, social and financial health
• ‘Dress for Your Day’ – enjoy the freedom to wear whatever makes you feel great for the type of work you do and the day you have ahead of you

When everyone is included, everyone wins

We’re all individuals. And we love that. That’s why we encourage applications from Indigenous Australians, people with disability, those from diverse cultural backgrounds, our friends in the LGBTQIA+ community, and anyone else who wants to join our family.

Ready to apply?

We’re ready to hear from you. Apply now.