Staff Engineer - AI - Merchant Experience

About the role

As a Staff Engineer with a focus on AI at Tyro you will be a hands on technical leader in our Technology team, designing the engineered systems and reusable capabilities that power AI across the merchant experience and beyond. You will build AI powered products on top of foundation models while creating the patterns, services, and tooling that let other teams adopt AI safely and quickly, creating capabilities as you build applications.

We employ Agile methods, and you'll work alongside designers, product managers, architects, and other engineers to define and execute on our vision and values, and to set the standard for how Tyro builds with AI in a highly regulated payments environment.

What you'll do Designing AI Systems

• Lead the design, development, testing, and deployment of high quality, scalable systems built on foundation models, driving best practices for security, reliability, performance, and maintainability.
• Architect AI systems end to end. Capabilities to include Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), agentic and tool using workflows, orchestration, and the integration of models with Tyro's services and APIs including the production serving and retrieval layers that supply context and signals to models at request time.

Building Reusable Capabilities

• Create reusable capabilities while delivering applications, defining patterns for AI usage packaging them as shared services, templates, and reference implementations.
• Enable other teams to adopt AI safely and independently within defined guardrails, accelerating delivery without resolving the same problems.

Technical Leadership

• Set technical standards and mentor engineers, establishing how Tyro builds with foundation models. Lead code reviews and technical discussions to promote a culture of excellence and continuous learning.
• Drive architectural decisions for AI systems that balance trade offs between technical feasibility, scalability, cost, latency, and business value, partnering with product managers, designers, architects, and domain experts to turn requirements into AI powered solutions.

Quality, Security, and Governance

• Embed Responsible AI principles, security controls, mitigates risks, and governance aligned to Tyro's regulatory obligations, including APRA and PCI DSS.

What you'll bring

• Strong software engineering fundamentals, with hands on experience building production services in Kotlin and/or Node.js (TypeScript)
• Hands on experience building with foundation model APIs (e.g. AWS Bedrock, Anthropic, OpenAI), including model selection, structured outputs, and tool/function calling
• Experience designing AI systems using Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), embeddings and vector stores, and production serving/retrieval layers such as feature stores
• Experience with agile software development methodologies
• Understanding of good architecture, basing decisions on value
• A collaborative approach to working together with other engineers, product managers, partners and UX designers.
• Understanding of Responsible AI and governance in regulated industries (e.g. APRA, PCI DSS)

Nice to have

• Familiarity with Python and AI/ML stacks, front end experience (React/TypeScript/CSS) where AI features are merchant facing; and exposure to responsible AI practices and guardrails in a regulated environment

What's in it for you?

You'll also receive:

• A mix of in office and remote working (3 days in the office)
• Learning and career development opportunities
• 18 weeks paid primary carers leave
• 12 weeks paid secondary carers leave
• Annual team based volunteer day
• Birthday Leave
• Power Up Day (Additional day of leave)
• Weekly team social events, snacks, craft beer and wine, ping pong and video games
• Taco Tuesdays
• Mental health and wellness initiatives
• Novated leasing

Tyro is committed to a diverse, inclusive workplace where everyone thrives. We welcome applicants of all backgrounds and are an equal opportunity employer. If you need accommodations or adjustments at any stage of the recruitment process, simply inform our Talent team during your conversation with them.