Technical Lead - AI (Brisbane)

About BHP

At BHP we support our people to grow, learn, develop their skills, and reach their potential.

With a global portfolio of operations, we offer a diverse and inclusive environment with extraordinary career opportunities. Our strategy is to focus on creating a safe work environment where our employees feel strongly connected to our values and objectives, and where the capability of our people is key to our success. 

Be a part of this success.

About the Role

We’re looking for a dynamic and visionary Technical Lead – AI to drive the delivery of holistic digital solutions that combine the robustness of traditional software engineering with the transformative power of AI. This role sits at the intersection of system design, AI innovation, and business value creation, leading the charge in shaping how digital solutions evolve across our mining operations.

Through technical and cultural leadership of a cross-discipline development team, including software engineers, data & AI engineers and data scientists, this role will drive future digital and AI delivery capability, AI-ops excellence and innovation.  The AI Technical Lead is willing to continuously learn, unafraid to challenge technical constraints and procedures and unblocks where required to empower our engineers to build well-architected and sustainable digital solutions.

Key responsibilities include:

• Build Trusted Relationships: Engage with internal customers, product owners, and technical peers across Data & Digital Australia, applying critical thinking, empathy, and a solution-oriented mindset to deliver well-engineered outcomes.
• Design Holistic Solutions: Define and oversee the architecture of cloud-based digital solutions that integrate frameworks and patterns from software engineering, data science, and AI engineering.
• Advance Technical Practice: Maintain a strong grasp of infrastructure, architecture, and engineering practices and establish direction for standardised technical delivery to drive cost-effective, high-quality, high-velocity delivery. Lead technical discussions across Coal Digital and beyond, bringing the outside in and the inside out. Evolve our practice toward AI-assisted SDLC, and champion systemized ways of working.
• Mentor and Inspire Innovation: Support the growth and capability of engineers through mentorship and technical leadership. Foster a culture of creativity, inclusion, and continuous improvement aligned with BHP values.
• Align Strategy and Execution: Collaborate with product teams and leadership to define Quarterly Business Review (QBR) strategies, track OKRs, and ensure technical quality goals align with product outcomes.
• Own and Evolve Solutions: Take strong ownership of digital applications, setting solid foundations for their sustainability, reliability, and future evolution.
• Stay Ahead of the Curve: Remain current with advancements in AI, software engineering, and cloud technologies, bringing fresh ideas to drive innovation and shape the future of digital delivery.

About You

To be successful in this role, you are a capable engineering leader. The qualities and experience you possess include:

• You have solid (10+ years) experience as a software engineer, data engineer / scientist, or solution architect and has recently ventured into AI engineering. You can architect technical solutions in an enterprise setting and you leverage expertise in DevOps, ML Ops, AI Ops, platform engineering, modern cloud-native (Azure or AWS) services. 
• You are experienced with designing and delivering AI workflows and agentic solutions, including model evaluations, tool-use and LLM/SLM orchestration frameworks and integration into broader workflows.
• You have a point of view on the opportunities with agentic AI to transform business operations and how to architect and leverage AI and traditional technology to bring about transformation. Experience with semantic modeling and knowledge graphs to enhance contextual understanding is highly regarded.
• You possess strong coding skills (software engineering C#, React Typescript stack or data science python), and you can design and build on cloud infrastructure, applying software engineering & systems thinking to bring to life loosely-coupled mini / microservices architectures.
• You are experienced in both technical and people leadership / team leadership, making sound decisions and delivering outcomes on technical projects as well as influencing and coaching others.
• You have worked in Digital teams or digital transformation and have a passion for delivering value with velocity.
• Experience or strong knowledge of enterprise data management and governance is highly regarded.
• Experience with customer engagement, change management, technology pre-sales/thought leadership, is highly regarded.
• Experience in the mining and resources sector or working with Operational Technology is highly regarded.

About Our Process

At BHP, we are committed to employing individuals who align with the BHP Charter Values and meet the requirements of the role. As part of the recruitment process, there are a number of checks which may be conducted to demonstrate applicants suitability for a role including police / criminal background checks, medical, drug and alcohol testing, due diligence checks, right to work checks, and/or reference checks. 

If you are already employed directly by BHP, please log in using your BHP email address or apply via our internal jobs portal. 

Supporting a diverse workforce

The size, stability and magnitude of our business not only provides significant opportunity for professional development, but also attractive salary packages with performance-based bonuses and a best-in-class employee share program. We know there are many aspects of our employees' lives that are important, and work is only one of these, so we offer benefits to enable your work to fit with your life. These benefits include flexible working options, a generous paid parental leave policy, other extended leave entitlements and parent rooms.  

At BHP, we know that we are strengthened by diversity. We are an Equal Opportunity employer that is committed to making BHP a safe and inclusive workplace where everyone can thrive and be at their best every day. We are focused on creating a workforce that’s more diverse and represents the communities where we work and live. providing a work environment in which everyone is included, treated fairly and with respect. We are an Equal Opportunity employer and recognise that true diversity includes gender, age, race, disability status, sexual orientation, religion, neurodiversity, education levels, and many more aspects of your identity.

BHP is committed to providing a recruitment process that is fair, equitable and accessible for all. If you have a disability, we know that it may be helpful for us to adjust our process to make it equitable for your individual situation. If you would like to reach out to someone about your situation and our recruitment process, please email us at inclusion@bhp.com

This is a full-time role, based at the BHP Brisbane office. You will be working Monday – Friday and we offer flexible work arrangements.