Location: Sydney
Role Type: Permanent

Recognised as one of the world’s largest IT and business consulting firms, CGI has offices across Australia, supporting local public and private sector clients to solve real business problems.

We have an opportunity for a Principal AI Architect to join our Data & AI Engineering practice and lead AI strategy, architecture, and enterprise-scale solution design for a major client. Drawing on your deep expertise in AI, data engineering, and cloud architecture, you will shape next-generation AI platforms, influence C-suite stakeholders, and contribute to our strong culture of technical leadership and innovation.

Flexible work is available including hybrid work from home

• Report to Head of Data/AI Engineering and lead enterprise-wide AI/data architecture
• Develop AI strategy, reference architectures, design patterns, and architectural standards
• Evaluate technologies, drive POCs, and provide guidance on complex technical decisions
• Build business cases with roi/tco analysis and translate technical concepts for c-suite
• Establish architecture governance (ADRs), ensure security/compliance requirements
• Mentor architects/engineers, present to senior leadership, represent organization at events
• Stay current with emerging AI/ML technologies and industry best practices

Leadership & Strategic Impact
• Proven leadership in defining AI/data strategy and enterprise architecture aligned with business objectives
• Demonstrated ability to build compelling business cases with ROI analysis, TCO modeling, and FinOps cost optimization
• Exceptional communication skills with the ability to influence and present to C-suite stakeholders
• Track record of mentoring architects and engineers while establishing architecture governance frameworks

Data Engineering & Cloud Infrastructure
• Strong data engineering background including data lakes, lakehouses, warehouses, and batch/streaming ETL/ELT pipelines
• Deep expertise in data governance, quality management, metadata management, and lineage tracking
• Hands-on proficiency with at least one major cloud platform (AWS, Azure, or GCP)
• Experience with modern vector databases and hybrid search capabilities

Core ML & Production MLOps
• Deep expertise in ML algorithms, deep learning architectures (CNNs, RNNs, Transformers), and neural networks
• Comprehensive understanding of full model lifecycle from data preparation through production deployment
• Strong experience across supervised, unsupervised, semi-supervised, and reinforcement learning paradigms
• Production ML expertise including deployment, monitoring, drift detection, retraining, and CI/CD pipelines
• Proficiency with model serving, A/B testing, canary deployments, and real-time inference systems

LLMs & Generative AI Implementation
• Hands-on experience with LLMs/SLMs, embedding models, Cross Encoders, and VLMs (GPT-4V, Claude, Gemini)
• Advanced prompting techniques including chain-of-thought, few-shot learning, and instruction tuning
• Expertise with tool use, function calling, and at least one agentic framework (LangChain, LangGraph, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, ADK)
• Working knowledge of at least two cloud AI services (AWS Bedrock & AgentCore, Azure AI Foundry, or Google Vertex AI)

RAG Architecture & Retrieval Systems
• Expertise designing RAG pipelines with various patterns (NaiveRAG, HybridRAG, GraphRAG, AgenticRAG)
• Strong experience with optimized chunking strategies, vector search indexes, and hybrid search implementations
• Proficiency with reranking, query routing, and cost optimization strategies for retrieval systems

AI Safety, Evaluation & Governance
• Strong experience with AI evaluation frameworks (DeepEval, RAGAs, MLFlow, LLM-as-Judge)
• Expertise in hallucination detection/mitigation, factuality verification, and content moderation
• Implementation experience with guardrails, PII detection, toxicity filtering, and responsible AI practices

AI Agents & Advanced Systems
• Understanding of agent workflows including task decomposition, planning, reflection, and tool use
• Experience with state management, memory architectures, observability, and error recovery patterns
• Knowledge of context window management, token optimization, and structured output generation

Together, as owners, let’s turn meaningful insights into action.

Life at CGI is rooted in ownership, teamwork, respect and belonging. Here, you’ll reach your full potential because…

You are invited to be an owner from day 1 as we work together to bring our Dream to life. That’s why we call ourselves CGI Partners rather than employees. We benefit from our collective success and actively shape our company’s strategy and direction.

Your work creates value. You’ll develop innovative solutions and build relationships with teammates and clients while accessing global capabilities to scale your ideas, embrace new opportunities, and benefit from expansive industry and technology expertise.

You’ll shape your career by joining a company built to grow and last. You’ll be supported by leaders who care about your health and well-being and provide you with opportunities to deepen your skills and broaden your horizons.

Come join our team—one of the largest IT and business consulting services firms in the world.