Forward Deployed Engineer: Agentic AI & Python | Perth | Fully Remote | A$200K–A$275K

Be the first Forward Deployed Engineer in Australia for a well-funded, VC-backed AI startup building an AI engineer for the physical world.

Our client is a fast-growing AI startup building an AI engineer agent that works on real physical engineering problems: mechanical, electrical, aerospace, mining and process. Founded in 2024 and backed by top-tier US venture investors, they have a team of around 26 and a long-term goal of engineering AGI.

Their Forward Deployed Engineers sit in the US. Their Australian customer base is growing, and they need someone here who can own it. That’s you.

The role

You’ll be the technical lead on customer deployments. This is a fully remote role based in Perth, with time alongside the customer’s engineers when the work needs it. You’ll:

• Run technical discovery with customer engineering teams and find the pain points that matter
• Design and ship end-to-end agentic AI solutions fast, from 0 to 1, and make the key calls on architecture, data integrations and UX
• Integrate the product into complex industrial and engineering workflows
• Lead whiteboarding sessions and lunch-and-learns, and handle live incident response with senior engineering leaders
• Feed what you learn back to the core engineering and AI research teams to shape the product
• Report to the Head of Customer Engineering

What you’ll bring

• Must have: hands-on experience building and shipping agentic AI or multi-agent systems in production, in Python. General ML or computer vision experience alone isn’t enough.
• 3–10 years as a Forward Deployed Engineer, AI Engineer, product builder or founder, or as a physical engineer who moved into software
• Understanding of complex physical or industrial engineering workflows (mechanical, electrical, aerospace, mining or process), or software experience in the mining or resources sector
• The presence to lead a room of senior engineers and customers
• Based in Australia, with Australian citizenship or permanent residency (visa sponsorship isn’t available)

Bonus points

• Experience at early-stage AI startups or physical-AI scale-ups, or at industrial and mining companies such as Rio Tinto, BHP or Hancock
• Enterprise customer deployments or customer-facing technical work
• A standout track record, such as founding a company, being an early startup employee, or an impressive side project

Why join

• A$200K–A$275K base, full-time
• Build the first AI engineer agent for the physical world, with custom agent harnesses and proprietary training data
• Solve real engineering problems with a big, tangible impact on Australian industry
• Be the founding member of the Australian team, with room to grow it as the customer base expands
• A short interview process: a hiring manager chat, a hands-on technical session and a final conversation with the CEO

Apply

Apply below, or contact Julia at Big Wave Digital for a confidential chat: julia@bigwavedigital.com.au or +61 2 9380 4431.