Principal AI Engineer - Platform & Inference

Our Opportunity

Work location: Remote or Perth, Western Australia

Roster: Monday – Friday

Fortescue is seeking a hands-on Principal AI Engineer – Platform & Inference to provide senior technical leadership across AI platform architecture, inference, deployment and production engineering.

You will set technical direction while staying close to the engineering detail, helping design and build secure, scalable and highly observable AI platforms and services for complex, real-world operations.This is an opportunity to influence how AI is engineered and operationalised at scale, working across distributed systems, cloud-native platforms, model serving and production inference.

Work from where you do your best work

You don't need to be based in Perth to take on this role. We are open to exceptional candidates working remotely. 

If relocating to Perth is something you're interested in, Fortescue can provide relocation support to help make the move possible.

We are also open to international talent and can provide relocation support for the candidate that wants to establish themselves in Perth Western Australia

 Why this role

• Principal-level influence. Shape AI platform architecture, engineering standards and technology direction while remaining hands-on.
• Solve challenging engineering problems. Work across distributed systems, platform engineering, model serving and inference performance.
• Build for production and scale. Help establish the engineering foundations required to move sophisticated AI workloads into reliable production environments.
• Meaningful real-world impact. Apply advanced AI engineering to high-value operational challenges across a large, technology-led organisation.
• Flexibility. Work remotely or from Perth, with relocation and visa support available for candidates interested in making Western Australia home.

Key Responsibilities

• Set architecture and engineering standards for AI/ML platforms, model serving and inference systems.
• Design scalable, secure and production-grade platform services, APIs and automation.
• Lead architecture reviews, complex design decisions and hands-on technical problem solving.
• Design approaches for workload orchestration, resource management and distributed AI workloads.
• Establish highly observable and reliable production environments, including monitoring, telemetry, security and operational tooling.
• Develop production model hosting and inference capabilities, including serving, routing, scaling and performance optimisation.
• Drive improvements across performance, reliability and infrastructure efficiency.
• Establish strong software engineering, testing, release and operational practices.

Qualifications and Experience

• Strong software, cloud platform, distributed systems or ML infrastructure engineering experience, with the technical depth to operate at Principal or Staff level.
• Strong hands-on experience with Kubernetes, cloud-native infrastructure and containerised distributed workloads.
• Experience with workload orchestration, scheduling and resource management in production environments.
• Strong software engineering capability in Python, Go, Rust or equivalent languages.
• Experience building APIs, automation and production platform services.
• Experience with production model serving, inference or ML infrastructure architectures.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, observability, reliability and platform security.
• Ability to independently design and build production systems while making pragmatic architectural decisions.

Highly regarded

• Experience with distributed compute or scheduling technologies such as Ray, Slurm or Kubernetes-based scheduling frameworks.
• Experience with model serving technologies such as vLLM, SGLang, Triton or equivalent.
• Understanding of modern LLM inference architectures and performance optimisation.
• Experience within  AI platform, cloud infrastructure or ML infrastructure environment.

About Us

Be part of something big. Fortescue is leading the world with our plan to decarbonise our iron ore operations, projects that harness renewable energy and the development of technology that will change our planet forever.

Our Commitment

Fortescue celebrates individual strengths and team members are encouraged to bring their whole selves to work. Our global workforce drives and promotes an inclusive culture, both within our organisation and throughout the communities we interact with. Diverse backgrounds include First Nations Peoples, people with disabilities, LGBTQ+ community, gender, neurodiverse, cultural diversity, all age groups, and those with an intersectional or multiple diverse characteristics. We encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply.

https://fortescue.com/careers 

Internal Candidates / Current Contractors please apply via Success Factors Careers Portal. For further information on how to apply please visit the Fortescue Hub. 

Fortescue reserves the right to close applications early should a suitable pool of candidates be identified. Fortescue will never contact you to ask for payment of any kind, whether directly or through a third party.