Lead AI Engineer

We're hipages, Australia's #1 digital platform connecting homeowners with trusted tradies. As an ASX-listed tech company, we're on a mission to transform the trade industry and improve lives. With teams across Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines and Vietnam, we work as one team with a shared purpose. We're proud to be a certified Great Place to Work and WORK180's #1 Employer for Women. At hipages, you'll find real impact, career growth and a workplace where everyone belongs. About the role This is a technical role. You'll turn frontier models into agentic features that add value to our customers, think an AI receptionist, assisted quoting, pricing guidance and build the shared AI service, evals and guardrails they run on. This is an exciting role: half hands-on shipping AI products, half setting the AI direction for the rest of the Engineering team. Why join our Engineering team? Hybrid working model Competitive salary, benefits, and everyday discounts In-house Talent Development team to prioritise personal and career growth Cross-functional collaboration Hands-on learning opportunities and workshops for continuous upskilling How you will add value Ship real agentic AI in production: think an AI receptionist, assisted quoting, and pricing guidance that tradies pay a premium for, not a demo that dies in a slide deck. Build the AI platform everyone else builds on: a shared service with unified model access, cost tracking, tracing and guardrails, engineered so the right path is the easy path. Make evals your quality gate: rigorous offline and online evaluation for non-deterministic systems, with real authority to block a release when it doesn't clear the bar. Own the hard economics of AI at scale: model selection, latency, cost, observability, and the guardrails that keep free-form AI safe in production. Exercise real judgment: know when a deterministic solution beats an agent, and have the standing to kill features that don't earn their keep. Set the technical dir