Job Description

• Shape the intelligent core of REA’s platform and deliver high-value, reliable AI/ML products at scale.
• Permanent role based in Melbourne or Sydney

We're REA

With bold and ambitious goals, REA Group is changing the way the world experiences property. No matter where you're at on your property journey, we're here to help with every step - whether that's finding or financing your next home.

Our people are the key to our success. At the heart of everything we do, is a thriving culture centred around high performance and care. We are purpose driven and collaborative, which drives innovation and our ability to make a real impact. As such, we’re proud to have been named one of Australia’s Best Workplaces four times since 2021 — including third place in 2025 — plus Best Workplace for Women in 2023 and Best Workplace in Technology in 2024 and 2025. These listings are testament to every person who helps make REA a great place to work.

Where the team fits in

The AI Enrichment squad sits in the Experiences & Platforms business unit. We are creating new products and solutions that will impact how Australians experience property, today and into the future. Day to day, you’ll be working with a multifunctional team across product, ML, engineering, data and consumer experience, building systems that leverage machine learning and generative AI.

What the role is all about

This is a unique opportunity to design, plan and deliver high-value, reliable AI/ML products at REA. As our Staff Machine Learning Engineer, you will be instrumental in shaping the intelligent core of our platform. You’ll tackle complex challenges in building reliable, maintainable and scalable AI/ML systems to directly impact millions of users by helping them discover properties in ways they never thought possible.

• Lead strategically important AI/ML initiatives, shaping architecture and engineering practices to deliver high-quality product capabilities.
• Be a technical leader who supports the Engineering Manager in setting technical direction, uplifting ML engineering capability, and championing best practices, ethics and engineering excellence.
• Collaborate across functions and specialisations to understand needs, set direction and design high-quality solutions aligned to commercial priorities.
• Inform product discovery, delivery planning and technical design with balanced views on feasibility, effort and quality.
• Design, build, deploy and operate end-to-end ML products, pipelines and services using Python, modern ML frameworks and AWS.
• Own the production ML lifecycle, including experimentation, versioning, evaluation, deployment, monitoring and continuous improvement.
• Establish robust evaluation frameworks to track performance, detect drift and maintain quality at scale.
• Develop and optimise ML solutions across product use cases including LLM engineering, relevance, retrieval, ranking and generative AI.
• Build and evolve data and feature foundations for real-time and batch inference, with working fluency in SQL, Airflow, Kafka and BigQuery.
• Raise the bar for engineering quality, technical judgement and team effectiveness through mentoring, solution guidance and cross-squad collaboration.
• Act as an AI/ML engineering SME, championing ethical and compliant use of data while building REA’s AI/ML reputation internally and externally.

Who we’re looking for

• Deep experience delivering production AI/ML systems across machine learning, ML engineering, MLOps, software engineering and modern LLM-based solutions.
• Experience leading complex technical initiatives from discovery and solution design through to planning and delivery, balancing speed, quality, risk and long-term maintainability.
• Demonstrated expertise across the full ML lifecycle, including data preparation, training, evaluation, inference, deployment, observability and optimisation across structured and unstructured data.
• Strong software engineering practices, including test automation, CI/CD and evolutionary architecture, with high proficiency in Python and SQL.
• Proven ability to make sound decisions on ML approaches, tools and trade-offs for business problems and product opportunities.
• Strong leadership and mentoring skills, with a track record of uplifting engineers, influencing direction and building inclusive, high-performing teams.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to clearly articulate strategy, architecture and delivery decisions to technical and non-technical audiences.
• A collaborative mindset, strong ownership of production systems, and a growth mindset suited to a fast-moving environment.

The REA experience

The physical, mental, emotional and financial health of our people is something we’ll never stop caring about. This is a place to learn and grow.

Some of our Perks & Benefits include:

• A hybrid and flexible approach to working.
• Flexible leave options including birthday leave and the option to purchase additional leave.
• Flexible parental leave offering for primary and secondary carers.
• Our Because We Care program offers employees volunteering leave, community grants, matched payroll giving and our Community Café donates 100% of revenue to charity.
• Hackdays so you can bring your big ideas to life.

Our commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

We are committed to providing a working environment that embraces and values diversity, equity and inclusion. We believe teams with diverse ideas and experiences are more creative, more effective and fuel disruptive thinking. If you’ve got the skills, dedication and enthusiasm to learn but don’t necessarily meet every single point on the job description, please still get in touch.

Join our Talent Neighbourhood

Keen to be part of REA but didn’t find a perfect match with this opportunity? Perhaps the timing isn’t right? You should join our Talent Neighbourhood!