Principal Solutions Architect

Principal AI Engineer/Solutions Architect

Location: Melbourne (Hybrid, 3 days office / 2 days WFH)

Salary: Flexible for the right candidate

Visa: Sponsorship available

About the company

A profitable, self-funded technology company rebuilding how people buy in a high-consideration industry that has barely changed in over a decade. The dominant comparison sites in this space only show products from the handful of providers that pay them commission, which breeds real mistrust, and they lean heavily on call centres to close the gap, a model that is expensive and increasingly loss-making even at scale.

Their new product has already won a Gold Design gold award while still in beta, and the team's prior work in this space is good enough that competitors in the region are now buying access to it rather than trying to out-build it.

About the role

You will work side by side with the company's Lead Architect on a small, high-trust product team of five, all senior. This is a solutions-architecture role, not a narrowly defined backend or frontend position, you will be thinking in systems and trade-offs while AI increasingly handles implementation detail under your direction. Day to day work spans voice and conversational AI, transcript and data analysis, and using AI to generate genuinely useful content at scale, not low quality AI output. You will extend existing AI agent workflows and build new ones from scratch.

What you will need

• Strong software engineering background with real solutions-architecture experience, thinking in systems and trade-offs, not just tickets
• Practical, hands-on AI and LLM fluency, a solid understanding of how LLMs work and experience using tools like MCP in real projects
• Experience with observability tooling, something in the ClickHouse or Langfuse family, or equivalent
• A track record of shipping features you can talk through in detail, not proof-of-concepts that never launched
• Comfortable moving across multiple projects rather than staying in one codebase for years
• TypeScript preferred for day to day work, Golang is fine, Python less so

Nice to have

• Voice agent experience (LiveKit or similar), not required, and it will be taught on the job
• Consultancy or multi-client background

Who does well here

People who take initiative and work things out rather than wait to be told, who would rather ship something imperfect and iterate than deliberate for weeks. Low ego, low bureaucracy, high trust.

Interview process

Three stages: a 30 minute introductory call, a technical interview with live coding, and a final culture conversation. This team moves quickly once they are excited about a candidate.