- Location
- Sydney, Australia
- Type
- Full-time
- Department
- Engineering
- Clearance
- Not required
- Closing date
- Today
- Source
- Workday
Description
Line of Service
AdvisoryIndustry/Sector
TechnologySpecialism
Advisory - OtherManagement Level
Senior AssociateJob Description & Summary
The AI team is comprised of highly experienced designers, developers, engineers, data scientists and analysts who are responsible for delivering digital products and AI solutions to PwC's business across multiple lines of service in Australia.We partner with subject matter experts across the business to advise on, design and build agentic AI systems and LLM-powered products that transform the way we deliver assurance, advisory, tax and legal services to our clients.
As an AI Engineer on our team, you will design, build and evaluate production agent systems: agents that reason, call tools, retrieve knowledge, manage their own context and complete long-horizon, multi-step tasks on behalf of our practitioners and clients. Our agent harness is built in TypeScript on the Vercel AI SDK, with model and provider routing handled through a LiteLLM-based gateway, and it runs at scale in the Azure cloud. You will own problems end to end: from framing the approach and prototyping, to shipping reliable, observable agents in production.
We are an evaluation-led team, so we care deeply about rigour: measuring agent quality, running evaluations, and using the scientific method to know whether something actually works, not just whether it demos well.
Why PwC?
At PwC Australia, your skills meet purpose. We tackle big challenges across industries like finance, technology, energy, and health —giving you the chance to make a real impact. Here, your growth is our priority. You’ll work with leading teams, explore new technologies, and unlock your full potential.
Join a global community of more than 370,000 people who value bold ideas, collaboration, and lasting change. Together, we’re building trust and shaping the future.
What you’ll do:
Build and extend our agent harness in TypeScript: the runtime loop, tool dispatch, streaming, retries and tool-call repair, state persistence and recovery, and the guardrails that keep agents reliable and on-budget.
Design context and memory strategies for long-horizon work: context compaction and summarisation, working versus long-term memory, prompt and response caching, cache-aware prompt construction, and token budgeting across multi-step runs.
Architect multi-agent and sub-agent systems: lead and worker patterns, task decomposition, parallel sub-agent execution, hand-off and delegation contracts, shared state, and result aggregation back to a lead agent.
Design and expand agent tool ecosystems with well-typed, testable schemas: a sandboxed command tool giving agents a real filesystem and shell, file and document operations, code execution, web search, and connectors that surface enterprise and client data sources (for example MS Graph, SharePoint, Outlook and Teams) to agents as tools.
Route across multiple models and providers through our LiteLLM-based gateway, tuning model selection, fallbacks and routing policy for quality, latency and cost - including the use of small language models for narrow, high-volume or latency-sensitive steps.
Engineer retrieval and RAG pipelines that ground agent outputs in trusted sources: chunking, embeddings, vector search on PostgreSQL with pgvector, hybrid and re-ranked retrieval, and retrieval exposed to agents as tools.
Produce structured, reliable model outputs using typed schemas (for example Zod with the Vercel AI SDK) and design robust prompts, system instructions and agent skills.
Build evaluation harnesses and offline batch evals, including deep-research style runs and trajectory-level assessment of tool use, to measure accuracy, faithfulness, cost and latency - and use those signals to iterate.
Instrument agents with observability and tracing (for example Langfuse, OpenTelemetry) and track token usage, cache hit rates and cost in production.
Produce clean, maintainable, efficient code deployed at scale in the Azure cloud; scaffold new projects, pair with engineers, and review pull requests.
Contribute to team stand-ups and the broader software development lifecycle, and participate in firmwide AI and engineering forums.
What we’re looking for: Applicants must be able to demonstrate the following key capabilities. We do not expect every box ticked, strong fundamentals and a track record of shipping LLM-powered products matter most.
Core skills:
Strong TypeScript development experience, ideally in a Node.js backend context, with confident use of the type system to model tool schemas, agent state and structured outputs.
Hands-on experience building agents with a modern agent framework or SDK, with the Vercel AI SDK strongly preferred (streaming, tool calling, structured generation, provider abstraction).
Demonstrated experience building or operating an agent harness or runtime loop in production: tool dispatch, error handling and tool-call repair, interrupt and resume, and long-running task execution.
Practical understanding of context engineering: context window management and compaction, memory design, prompt and response caching, and cost/latency trade-offs across a multi-step run.
Experience designing multi-agent architectures, including sub-agent orchestration, delegation boundaries, shared state and failure handling.
Deep, practical knowledge of prompt engineering, agentic patterns, tool and function calling, and structured outputs.
Experience routing across multiple models and providers through a gateway such as LiteLLM, and reasoning clearly about model selection trade-offs.
Experience building and optimising RAG and retrieval pipelines, including their evaluation, with industry-standard tooling.
Strong experience with PostgreSQL, including pgvector for embeddings and hybrid or semantic search, and using Postgres as the durable store for agent state, memory and traces.
An evaluation-first mindset: designing evals for agent behaviour, and using evidence rather than demos to reach defensible conclusions about quality.
Strong critical thinking, analytical rigour and outstanding attention to detail.
Proper source code management and confident use of Git, and comfort working in a large shared monorepo (for example Nx or Yarn workspaces) with project boundaries and shared libraries.
Good written and verbal communication, and the ability to work effectively with remote teams.
A proactive, problem-solving approach and the ability to solve complex problems as part of a team.
Desirable skills:
Experience with small language models (SLMs): selecting, fine-tuning, distilling, quantising or self-hosting smaller models, and using them for routing, classification, extraction or guardrail steps within a larger agent system.
Experience with LLM observability and cost/quality tracing (for example Langfuse, OpenTelemetry).
Experience designing sandboxed execution environments for agents: containerised or virtualised sandboxes, shell and filesystem access exposed as a command tool, isolation and resource limits, and safe tool surface design. Familiarity with emerging tool-interoperability standards such as MCP is a plus.
Experience building connectors and integrations to enterprise systems and data sources, including authentication, permissioning, incremental sync and rate-limit handling.
Full-stack TypeScript experience (NestJS, Next.js / React) with either tRPC or GraphQL / Apollo including code generation, and building interfaces for agent products such as streaming and human-in-the-loop review.
Experience with computer-use or browser-automation agents (for example Playwright).
Experience with document generation pipelines (DOCX, PPTX, PDF) or rich-text editor frameworks such as Lexical, ideally over a real-time collaborative layer (Yjs / Hocuspocus or equivalent CRDT tooling).
Working Python capability, including building and running production services (for example FastAPI) as well as evaluation, data work and model experimentation; comfort moving across the TypeScript and Python stack is valued.
A research background in ML or LLM development, and the ability to identify emerging techniques and apply them to practical situations.
Knowledge of classical ML and deep learning, preferably in NLP.
Experience with well-structured backend services at scale: microservices and containerisation (Docker), and ideally domain-driven and event-driven patterns such as domain / application / infrastructure layering, repositories and domain events.
Experience with durable job queues and background processing for long-running agent workloads (for example BullMQ on Redis, Azure Service Bus), and with Redis for caching, locks and shared state.
Experience developing on cloud environments, particularly Azure (Azure OpenAI, AI Search, Blob, Key Vault, App Insights).
Knowledge of agile software development lifecycles (SDLC), and exposure to CI/CD pipelines (Azure DevOps, GitHub Actions) and infrastructure as code (Terraform).
What you’ll gain:
The opportunity to work with leading organisations and cutting-edge technology that challenge and expand your expertise.
Work within an inclusive environment committed to Inclusion and Diversity and First Nations Prosperity, ensuring diverse perspectives are at the forefront of our work.
Flexibility means trusting you to choose when, where, and how you work balancing what’s best for you, your team, and your clients to grow and thrive together.
Clear paths for career progression supported by continuous learning and leadership development.
Generous leave entitlements to support your work-life balance - including floating public holidays, birthday leave and ability to purchase additional leave on top of your four weeks.
A world-class parental leave policy offering up to 26 weeks of leave for caregivers, supporting your family and personal life.
We know that perks are as important as your financial rewards. Explore all the benefits that PwC has to offer here.
Ready to grow here and go further? Join PwC Australia as a [Job Title] and make an impact that goes beyond the expected. Apply now and take your next step with a team shaping the future.
We’re committed to treating all our job applicants fairly and with respect, irrespective of their actual or assumed background, disability, neurodivergence, or any other protected characteristic and to maintaining a safe, respectful workplace for everyone. We want you to have every opportunity to thrive in our selection process. In the application form, you can let us know what adjustments you require during our recruitment process and/or any workplace accommodations you anticipate needing to help you perform your role.
No agencies please: We kindly request that recruitment agencies do not submit CVs in response to this advertisement. We are only accepting applications directly from individuals.
Education (if blank, degree and/or field of study not specified)
Degrees/Field of Study required:Degrees/Field of Study preferred:Certifications (if blank, certifications not specified)
Required Skills
AI Agents, Data ScienceOptional Skills
Accepting Feedback, Accepting Feedback, Active Listening, AI Implementation, Analytical Thinking, C++ Programming Language, Communication, Complex Data Analysis, Creativity, Data Analysis, Data Infrastructure, Data Integration, Data Modeling, Data Pipeline, Data Quality, Deep Learning, Embracing Change, Emotional Regulation, Empathy, GPU Programming, Inclusion, Intellectual Curiosity, Java (Programming Language), Learning Agility, Machine Learning {+ 25 more}Desired Languages (If blank, desired languages not specified)
Travel Requirements
Up to 20%Available for Work Visa Sponsorship?
YesGovernment Clearance Required?
NoJob Posting End Date
September 30, 2026