Software Engineer, AI/ML (mid-level / senior / staff)

at a 
Chemical Intelligence AI Platform
Type of role:  
Full-time
Location
Australia, New Zealand, Remote
Cash Compensation
Competitive Market Salary
Equity provided
Yes
Working style
Remote
Team size
20-30
Seniority
All levels
Main skills
Python, LLM tooling, TypeScript
Company's funding stage
Seed
Date posted
May 7, 2026

About the company

We are a VC-backed startup building AI tools that transform how chemists work - funded by Blackbird, Airtree, and Scott Farquhar's Skip Capital. We're early but moving fast, with strong traction and a clear path to scale.

We are building Chemical Intelligence. Chemistry touches nearly every aspect of our lives and the problem we're trying to solve has significant scope and magnitude and will directly affect people's lives for the better if we're successful. We are doing something that has never been done before - operating at a unique intersection of the physical and digital world.

Why? Because we believe Chemical Intelligence is the key to a better future.

From enhancing existing products to making new ones. Aiding good hygiene to addressing world hunger. Protecting our homes against the elements to protecting the sovereignty of nations.

About the team

  • Builder culture. You'll have high agency and make product decisions constantly. In the age of AI, taste and judgment are the most valuable skills an engineer can have — we want people who already think this way and want to sharpen it further.
  • Competitive pay. Benchmarked to scale-up comp, plus a meaningful equity stake. You're an owner.
  • On the technical frontier. We're figuring out what AI-first software looks like for an industry that's never had modern tooling. The problems are genuinely hard: the UI/UX, data models, and agent capabilities for this space don't exist yet. You're not re-implementing something that already works elsewhere — you're inventing it.
  • Remote-first, AEST-anchored. We're distributed, but our core collaboration hours are Sydney time. We'll host you in Sydney for onboarding so you can meet the team in person.
  • No-nonsense recruitment. Informal chats with the founders and a technical conversation with the team. No LeetCode, no take-home busywork — we want to see how you actually think and build.

About the job

We’re hiring an ambitious AI engineer who wants to collaborate with PhD chemists on deep technical problems, and ship real product from day one. You’ll work directly with the founders and a team of engineers and scientists on vertical-specific AI challenges in one of the world’s most important industries.

Responsibilities

  • Design and ship agentic workflows, retrieval systems, and LLM features that run in production
  • Build the evals, tracing, and guardrails that make AI features reliable enough for enterprise customers
  • Work across the stack when needed — you'll spend most of your time in Python, but you'll touch the TypeScript codebase too
  • Turn messy, ambiguous requirements (sometimes literally chemical spec sheets) into clear, buildable systems
  • Keep the bar high on code quality, testing, and reliability — we're building software enterprises will run their business on
  • Drive timelines and keep things moving, including pushing back when scope is wrong

What you’ll get

  • Work hour flexibility
  • We are a remote-first company.
  • Chance to work with smart people on interesting problems
  • Using cutting-edge technology
  • Opportunity to make a significant impact on a growing company
  • Preferred timezone: Australia.

Requirements

Personal Attributes
This role is perfect for someone who's been building with LLMs hands-on, is energized by green-field problems, and cares as much about whether the system actually works in production as whether the demo looks good.

  • You've shipped LLM features to real users and have scars to show for it — you know the difference between a prompt that works on five examples and one that works on five thousand
  • You take evals seriously and have opinions about how to measure AI systems
  • You take ownership and push for excellence — you're the kind of person who notices the thing that's broken and fixes it, even when it's not "your" code
  • You don't wait to be told what to do
  • You're comfortable figuring things out with limited resources and imperfect information
  • You adapt fast when priorities change (and they will, especially in AI)
  • You're always improving your craft — you read papers, you tinker, you have opinions about tools and models

Technical requirements

  • Python, LLM tooling, agent frameworks, vector stores, eval pipelines.
  • TypeScript, NestJS / Express, Next.js, React, PostgreSQL for the product surfaces you'll integrate with.
  • Bonus points for AWS and CI/CD (GitHub Actions, CDK).
  • We care less about which specific tools you've used and more about how quickly you can get productive in a new one — the AI stack changes every six months anyway.

Apply for this role
For information or support contact hello@skillsrobin.com