Principal AI Engineer and Technical Lead

Company overview

About the role

Location and employment

• Melbourne is preferred, with consideration for strong candidates elsewhere in Australia and exceptional candidates within about two hours of Australian Eastern Time.
• The engagement requires regular on-site presence at client locations and offers flexible hybrid arrangements around those needs.
• The employment arrangement is full-time.

What you will do

• Own technical architecture and end-to-end delivery from data foundations through models, optimisation, and evidence of performance.
• Lead client methodology reviews, steering sessions, executive readouts, and technical engagement activities.
• Lead a pod of machine-learning and data engineers and set standards for code review, testing, reproducibility, and documentation.
• Build and operate large-scale production data pipelines on Google Cloud Platform and BigQuery with cost and governance controls.
• Design, ship, and validate propensity, uplift, visitation-frequency, and offer-adoption models.
• Apply causal inference and experimentation methods including matched controls, double machine learning, holdouts, and power analysis.
• Build optimisation engines using mixed-integer and linear programming, assignment, and scheduling methods.
• Maintain architecture documents, decision registers, and evidence packs that withstand technical review.
• Translate technical work into plain language for business and executive audiences.

What you bring

• Ten or more years building and shipping production data and machine-learning systems, including technical or team leadership experience.
• Deep, hands-on Python and SQL and production data engineering on a major cloud platform.
• Applied causal inference and experimentation experience, including uplift modelling, difference-in-differences, double machine learning, and power analysis.
• Experience with mathematical optimisation for operational problems, including mixed-integer or linear programming and assignment or scheduling.
• Client-facing delivery experience with senior executives and external delivery partners.
• Experience integrating large language models and agentic systems into production solutions.
• Strong habits around testing, reproducibility, data lineage, documentation, governance, and auditability.
• The right to work in Australia or residence in a time zone within approximately two hours of Australian Eastern Time.

Preferred experience

• Google Cloud Platform and BigQuery experience are ideal; AWS, Databricks, or Microsoft Azure experience can transfer well.
• Gaming, casino, hospitality, loyalty, and marketing analytics experience is advantageous.
• Recommendation systems, offer optimisation, workforce optimisation, and roster optimisation experience is advantageous.
• Experience integrating yield-management, workforce-management, player-tracking, or table-tracking vendor systems is advantageous.
• Responsible gaming, anti-money-laundering, privacy-by-design, consulting, or client-embedded delivery experience is advantageous.

What we offer

• A lead role on a high-visibility engagement with direct access to client executives and senior stakeholders.
• The opportunity to establish Blue Orange Digital's founding technical presence in Australia.
• Work spanning data engineering, causal inference, mathematical optimisation, and applied artificial intelligence.
• A builder culture where engineers lead and ship and technical judgement carries weight.
• Competitive compensation with a performance-based bonus, professional development budget, and certification support.

Application notes

• Submit a resume in English because all application materials must be in English for review and consideration.