Senior Applied AI Engineer

About the Role

At Podium, our mission is to arm every local business with a complete platform and outcome-driven AI employees that convert leads into real, paying customers. Every day, millions of workers use our AI lead conversion and communication platform to help them get more leads and make more money.

Our focus on helping local businesses thrive has earned us recognition across the industry — including Forbes’ Next Billion Dollar Startups, Forbes’ Cloud 100, the Inc. 5000, Fast Company’s World’s Most Innovative Companies, and G2 Grid Leader (#1 in Agentic AI).

As Podium continues to grow in Australia, we are building stronger local engineering capability to deliver AI-powered products tailored to the AU market—while staying aligned with global Product and Engineering teams.

This role is critical to increasing local delivery velocity, improving technical quality, and reducing reliance on global engineering bottlenecks. You will play a key role in shaping how solutions are designed and delivered locally, while maintaining alignment with global standards.

We believe in fostering a culture that thrives on hiring and developing exceptional talent. Our operating principles serve as a compass, guiding daily behaviour and decision-making, and ensure we hire people who will thrive at Podium. If you resonate with our principles and are energised by our mission, Podium will be a great place for you.

The Opportunity

You will design and deliver AI-powered products and workflows using Podium’s tech stack with integrations being a critical component. 

This is a hands-on, engineering-focused role where you’ll operate across the full development lifecycle—from problem definition and solution design through to implementation, testing, and deployment—leveraging AI-assisted development workflows.

You will take ownership of ambiguous problems, define effective approaches, and deliver high-quality solutions end-to-end. You will be expected to operate with a high degree of autonomy and make sound technical decisions without constant oversight.

You’ll contribute to improving how work is delivered locally by:

• raising the quality and consistency of technical outputs
• reducing iteration cycles with global engineering teams
• establishing repeatable patterns and best practices

What You’ll Do

• Design and build AI-powered products and integrations across multiple systems and partners
• Work within Git-based workflows (branching, pull requests, code reviews, deployments), including CI/CD pipelines
• Translate business and partner requirements into scalable, well-structured technical solutions
• Anticipate edge cases, failure modes, and data considerations early in the design process
• Produce clear, well-documented implementations that support efficient review and approval
• Leverage AI-assisted development tools (Claude Code, Cursor) and LLMs to accelerate development and improve output quality
• Build and iterate on AI-powered workflows, including prompt design and evaluatin