Principal Software Engineer

Senior / Principal Product Engineer: Real-Time AI Agents

Melbourne only · In the office 4 days a week · Full-time

$180k-$220k + super + ESOP

Software onboarding is broken. You can fix it.

A customer buys a product, books an onboarding call, gets lost, and files a support ticket. Our client has built an AI agent that skips all of that. It sees your screen, hears you, works out what you're trying to do, and talks you through it live. It responds in under two seconds.

It's already working for customers like Canva, Apollo and Google, and the opportunity is much bigger than onboarding alone.

The company

A Melbourne-based AI startup of around 15 people, with a five-person engineering team. The founders are ex-Atlassian and have already built and exited one AI company. They're seed-funded by tier-1 VCs, already booking revenue, and heading towards a Series A. Enterprise demand is outrunning what the team can serve right now.

The problems you'll own

• Latency: every millisecond between "user stops speaking" and "agent responds" is yours to fight for.
• Real-time audio and video: turn-taking, barge-in, echo remediation, voice activity detection, and working out when to speak based on what's happening on someone's screen.
• Agent knowledge: making the agent an instant subject-matter expert in any product, and keeping it current as products change.
• Scale: call infrastructure that holds up under unpredictable enterprise load, built by a team that's still small.

What the job really is

This isn't a ticket-taking role. You'll talk to customers, design a proof of concept, iterate, and ship something polished. You'll also help decide what gets built next. You'll work across the whole stack, alongside the founders, in the same room.

Who we want to meet

• You've owned something end to end. You shipped a product that real external users depended on, and the outcome was yours.
• You think like a product person. You care about the customer, the experience and the business outcome, not just clean code.
• You can show your passion. You can walk someone through something you built and explain why you made the calls you did.
• You've solved genuinely hard problems. You can explain the trade-offs you weighed, what you chose, and why.
• You communicate clearly. You can bring a non-technical teammate or a customer along with you, in writing and out loud, without jargon or rambling.
• You're at Senior or Principal level. We look at the scale of work you can deliver autonomously, and what you've built should match.

Bonus points for Series A-stage startup experience, LLMs in production (evals, tool-use, the gap between "can" and "reliably does"), real-time, voice or video systems, or developer tools and CS platforms.

Probably not the right fit if you need tightly defined tasks and fixed priorities, or if you chase technical novelty over business impact.

The stack

Python, TypeScript + Svelte, Kubernetes, GCP and WebRTC. We care more about how you think than whether your CV matches this list.

What's in it for you

• Real ownership. Your code and your judgement will shape the product, not just the backlog
• Daily access to the founders and a small, sharp engineering team
• A wellness centre with spa and sauna
• Career pathways that could include offshore moves, such as the US

Interested? Apply through this ad or message Paul at Talent Forge Group ([email protected]) for a confidential chat.