AI Engineer

Who We Are

At Pepper Money, we’re dedicated to helping people succeed. Whether it’s buying a family home, a dream car, developing professionally, or growing their business. We’ve become one of the largest, most trusted, and award-winning non-bank lenders in Australia and New Zealand. Over our 26 years, we’ve achieved a lot, but our proudest accomplishment is helping more than half a million Australians reach their goals through our ever-expanding lending options. 

The Role

We’re investing big in AI, and as our new AI Engineer, you will step into a high-visibility role at the forefront of Australian financial services. You will be at the forefront of our AI-powered transformation, designing the agentic ecosystems that will modernise our industry and create a more seamless, responsive experience for everyone we serve. This is a rare, career-defining opportunity to become the "thinking builder", architecting and deploying advanced AI Agents, Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) and event Autonomous Agentic AI at scale. 

You will engineer the cognitive loops that power our digital workforce, seamlessly bridging the gap between highly complex engineering concepts and tangible commercial ROI. As the technical engine of our digital workforce, your core focus areas will include:

• AI Services Mastery: Serve as the owner of our AI stack, with emphasis on leveraging Microsoft Foundry and Azure AI Services, but also other tools, to accelerate time-to-value rapidly.

• Agentic Development & Pro-Code Pragmatism: Drive the shift toward probabilistic reasoning using strong Python foundations. You will seamlessly balance bespoke engineering with pro-code and no-code accelerators for optimal model routing and fine-tuning.

• Advanced Orchestration: Design complex, stateful agent workflows using frameworks including Semantic Kernel, LangGraph, and the MS Agent Framework.

• Knowledge & Memory Architecture: Design RAG, persistent state and long-term memory for intelligent agents, utilising Azure AI Search, Cosmos DB, Redis, and the Graph API.

• Enterprise Integration: Securely integrate our digital workforce via the Model Context Protocol (MCP), Agent-to-Agent (A2A) communications, and Azure API Management (AI Gateway).

• Safety & Probabilistic Evaluation: Build automated "Evaluator Agents" and leverage LLM-as-a-Judge paradigms to red-team and benchmark worker agents. 

• Human-Agent Teaming (HAT): Design collaborative, observable workflows equipped with Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) checkpoints to ensure safe, efficient outcomes for our brokers and customers.

About you

To thrive in this role, you must be more than a brilliant technologist; you must be a strategic partner who is comfortable stepping away from the screen and into the boardroom to become a true AI leader. Because the AI frontier evolves daily, an insatiable, constant learning mentality is non-negotiable. Success depends on blending high-level stakeholder collaboration with a proactive "doer" mentality, moving rapidly from discovery to functional production. You will ground your relentless drive for emerging tech in meticulous technical rigour, precise prompt engineering, and robust architectural documentation. Ultimately, your leadership will ensure our AI roadmap is executed swiftly, safely, and with maximum commercial impact.

Here is what we are looking for:

• Engineering Tenure & Python Mastery: A strong foundational background with 5–8 years in Software, ML or DS Development, underpinned by deep, hands-on Python proficiency.

• Agentic AI Experience: 2+ years of proven experience architecting and deploying AI Agents, Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), Agentic AI or advanced AI-enabled applications in production.

• Cloud & Platform Literacy: Practical, hands-on exposure to Azure AI Services, Microsoft Foundry, or equivalent enterprise-grade cloud AI ecosystems.

• Relentless Adaptability: Extreme comfort and confidence navigating a fast-moving, ever-evolving technical frontier where relentless learning and capability upskilling are constant.

• Commercial Pragmatism: A practical, “can-do” mindset that expertly balances high-velocity experimentation with purposeful, value-driven delivery.

• Responsible Innovator: A baseline understanding of AI risks, such as hallucinations, to ensure ethical solution delivery.

At Pepper Money, cultural alignment and collaboration are just as vital as your technical skills. Our values are the heartbeat of our success, driving everything we do:

Can Do: We think outside the box and harness the power of teamwork to achieve the extraordinary.

Balanced: We set our customers up for success, crafting win-win outcomes that are both human and profitable.

Real: We keep it honest and respect everyone, building genuine connections.

Our Benefits

At Pepper, we're dedicated to making this a fantastic place to work and supporting you every step of the way. Enjoy a values-driven, diverse environment with a leadership team that inspires success and a culture that rewards excellence. We're always finding new ways to make Pepper a place for everyone:

• Development: a full suite of development opportunities and a great team to learn from

• Recognition: Celebrate efforts with our Spice Reward and Recognition Program and diversity through our DE&I initiatives 

• Flexibility: Embrace our hybrid working model, flexible parental leave policies and purchased leave options

• Health and Wealth: Free gym membership, discounted health insurance policies, novated leasing and staff loan rates to manage your mind, body and wallet!

• Referral Bonus: Earn $2000 for referring great people.

If this role sounds like it’s for you and you have experience in tackling some of the day-to-day tasks, we want to hear from you. 

For more information on Pepper, visit www.peppermoney.com.au.

Pepper is proud of our inclusive and diverse workplace that we have built over the last 26 years. Diversity is embedded in our people practices, the way we communicate and connect with each other, and it is recognised throughout our values.