AI Assistant JustAsk Your AI App Industries How it works Case studies Pricing Help Careers Sign in Build my AI assistant free
Dashboard AI Assistants Team assistant Knowledge library Team Profile Help
Theme
AI Engineering Hiring now

Senior AI Engineer, Retrieval & RAG

Own the retrieval layer every owns.ai answer stands on: hybrid search, chunking, ranking and the evaluations that prove each change made answers better.

Location
Surry Hills, NSW
Work
Hybrid or work from home (Australia)
Type
Full-time
Level
Senior

About the role

Every answer an owns.ai assistant gives is only as good as the passages it was handed. You'll own that step: how a business's website and documents are chunked, embedded, filtered by access and ranked, across thousands of assistants that each have their own knowledge. It's a small team, so you'll take ideas from a notebook to production yourself and watch them land in real customer conversations the same week.

What you'll do

  • Own hybrid retrieval (dense vectors plus BM25) across website pages, curated answers and uploaded documents
  • Design chunking and re-ranking that keep answers grounded, short and correctly cited
  • Build offline evaluation sets from real (anonymised) questions and track answer quality with every release
  • Keep retrieval fast and cheap: in-memory indexes per assistant, sensible caching, careful token budgets
  • Make sure document permissions (private, team, public) are enforced on every vector before it is scored
  • Mentor other engineers and write the design notes the rest of the team builds on

What you'll bring

  • 5+ years building production software, including 2+ years shipping LLM or search features
  • Hands-on experience with embeddings, vector search and lexical ranking, and when each one wins
  • Strong C#, Python or another typed language, and comfort reading code you didn't write
  • A habit of measuring: you'd rather show a before-and-after eval than argue from intuition
  • Clear writing, so a decision makes sense to someone who wasn't in the room

Nice to have

  • Experience with multilingual retrieval or non-English content
  • SQL Server, .NET or IIS in production
  • Work on prompt caching or token-cost optimisation

How we work

You'll be part of a small team based in our Surry Hills office, L1 457 Elizabeth Street, Surry Hills, NSW 2010, Australia. Come in when it helps and work from home when it doesn't: the role is open to people anywhere in Australia. We agree on outcomes and a few shared hours, then trust you with the rest.

Apply for this role

Senior AI Engineer, Retrieval & RAG · Surry Hills, NSW · hybrid or work from home

CV (PDF or Word, up to 8 MB)
All open roles

More open roles

See all 14 roles
AI Engineering

Graduate AI Engineer (2027 intake)

Start your career shipping real AI features to thousands of businesses, with a mentor, a structured first year and code in production from your first month.

  • Surry Hills, NSW
  • Hybrid · Work from home
  • Full-time
  • Graduate
Posted 7 OctView role
AI Engineering

Applied AI Engineer, Conversational Agents & Bookings

Teach assistants to get things done: book appointments, take call-backs and send jobs to Jobber, ServiceM8, Housecall Pro and simPRO without a human in the loop.

  • Surry Hills, NSW
  • Hybrid · Work from home
  • Full-time
  • Mid-level
Posted 6 OctView role
AI Engineering

AI Engineer, Document Intelligence

A 12-month contract to make the Knowledge library read anything a team uploads: scanned PDFs, slide decks, spreadsheets and photos of handwritten notes.

  • Surry Hills, NSW
  • Hybrid · Work from home
  • Contract
  • Mid-level
Posted 2 OctView role