Machine Learning Software Engineer

Our innovative client, a well-known mining & energy organisation, is looking for the next Machine Learning Software Engineer to join the team. This will be an initial 6 month contract with a solid pipeline of work on the horizon. This is a Perth CBD position that requires in office presence up to 3 times a week. This person should be comfortable in an environment where they can design, build, and scale real-world applications powered by large language models (LLMs). The right person will find themselves working closely with domain experts, product managers, and ML researchers to turn ideas into prototypes and prototypes into production-ready tools that solve meaningful problems using cutting-edge AI.

Key Responsibilities

• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to identify high-impact AI use cases that benefit from LLM capabilities
• Understand mining and engineering domain challenges and develop AI solutions to assist
• Design and build software applications and APIs that leverage LLMs (e.g., OpenAI GPT, Claude, Mistral, LLaMA)
• Implement prompt engineering strategies and optimisation techniques for specific business tasks
• Create autonomous agents capable of planning, reasoning, and executing complex multi-step tasks
• Integrate LLM-powered features into new or existing products with strong UX considerations
• Develop evaluation frameworks to test LLM output quality, relevance, and safety
• Stay on top of LLM advancements and contribute to internal best practices and technical strategy
• Write clean, maintainable, and well-documented code

About You
You’re a software engineer with a builder’s mindset and a passion for AI. You may not be a deep learning researcher, but you’re excited to turn LLMs into useful products. You can clearly communicate and present ideas, progress and results to both technical and non-technical audiences. 

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent experience
• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Strong proficiency in Python (preferred) or TypeScript/JavaScript
• Experience integrating APIs, especially LLMs (OpenAI, Hugging Face, etc.)
• Familiarity with modern backend frameworks (FastAPI, Flask, Node.js)
• Understanding of prompt engineering and basic model evaluation
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
• Experience with AI development tools and libraries (LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, etc.)

Preferred Qualifications

• Understanding of embeddings, vector databases, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
• Experience with front-end frameworks (React, Vue) for building user-facing LLM tools
• Experience with MLOps practices such as model versioning, monitoring, evaluation pipelines and CI/CD
• Familiarity with model fine-tuning or training using libraries like Hugging Face Transformers
• Knowledge of data privacy and security concerns when deploying AI applications

What We Offer

• The opportunity to work at the frontier of applied AI
• A collaborative and high-trust engineering culture
• Flexible work arrangements
• Access to powerful compute resources and the latest LLMs
• A chance to shape the next generation of intelligent tools

Full working Australian rights will be required. Perth based candidates or candidates planning a relocation to Perth preferred.
Due to a high level of applications and tight timeframe, shortlisted profiles will be contacted directly.
This role may progress with shortlisting ahead of closing date so make sure your application counts and apply.

With over 90 years' combined experience, NES Fircroft (NES) is proud to be the world's leading engineering staffing provider spanning the Oil & Gas, Power & Renewables, Chemicals, Construction & Infrastructure, Life Sciences, Mining and Manufacturing sectors worldwide. With more than 80 offices in 45 countries, we are able to provide our clients with the engineering and technical expertise they need, wherever and whenever it is needed. We offer contractors far more than a traditional recruitment service, supporting with everything from securing visas and work permits, to providing market-leading benefits packages and accommodation, ensuring they are safely and compliantly able to support our clients.