What are the responsibilities and job description for the Founding AI Engineer position at Dragonfly?
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Engineering·Sydney·Permanent
Founding AI Engineer
Location
Sydney CBD
Permanent
Team
Engineering
Compensation
Market-leading equity comp commensurate with experience
Build with consequence.
We're rebuilding entire businesses with AI from the inside out. You're building the platform that powers them.
Dragonfly is an AI-native holding company built for the long term. We acquire people-intensive services businesses across Australia and New Zealand and turn them into AI-native operations. The platform you build runs every business we own today, and every one we acquire next.
The platform is the product. The businesses we own are the proving grounds. Frontier stack, founder-level autonomy, feedback loops measured in days — not quarters.
The role
Founding engineer. Impact compounds with every acquisition.
The work spans the hardest parts of applied AI — the parts that aren't solved yet. Turning deep tacit operational expertise into systems that can act on it. Building agents that handle complex, multi-step decisions at scale. Designing knowledge representation that compounds as the portfolio grows. Running evals under production SLAs.
You work shoulder-to-shoulder with operators inside the businesses. That's where the signal is. Your job is to build the platform; theirs is to tell you what to build next and confirm when it's working.
Some weeks that's a quick win that removes friction overnight. Others, it's architecting foundations that reshape how every business in the portfolio runs. You'll move between both.
What you'll do
Ship the platform, end-to-end.
Entrepreneurial. AI-native. Pragmatic.
01
Entrepreneurial.
Founder, founding engineer, or someone who has operated with genuine ownership. You see a problem and close it. You don't need permission.
02
Deep in AI.
You've built with LLMs and agents in production. You ship with the frontier — not because you've mastered it, but because you chase it. You read, tinker, rebuild on weekends.
03
Full-stack & AI-native.
You ship end-to-end systems — data layer, AI orchestration and harness, backend, frontend, cloud. You amplify your output with AI development tools.
04
Product instincts.
You build things operators actually want to use. You have taste for how software should feel in someone's hands — not just whether it returns the right JSON.
05
At home in messy systems.
Legacy data, incomplete information, broken integrations, the gap between what the spec says and what the database actually contains. You know how to build systems that work inside it.
06
Pragmatic.
You've shipped ugly things that worked and elegant things that shipped on time. You know the difference matters.
07
Low ego. High standards.
You give and take direct feedback. You're willing to be wrong. You hold the bar high — for yourself and everyone around you.
08
Sydney-based.
We build in person.
Why join
Why here. Why now.
01
Frontier work, real stakes.
Every system you build runs against real operations, real revenue, real customers. Feedback loops are brutal and fast. You'll get better at this faster than anywhere else.
02
Small, elite team.
Founders, engineers, and operators who've built and scaled companies of consequence. The highest bar you've encountered — and everyone holds it.
03
World-class advisors.
Engineers and researchers behind groundbreaking AI research and some of the most transformational products shipped. They mentor, develop, and help shape the technical vision.
04
Autonomy, not permission.
Flat team. No committees. The decision is yours and the outcome is yours. The absence of permission-seeking is the point.
05
Asymmetric by design.
Operating cashflows plus venture upside. Founding equity in a firm built to be huge.
06
Permanent capital.
Built to compound over decades. No fundraise treadmill, no exit pressure.
07
Proudly Australian.
We're putting Australia on the frontier of applied AI. Elite work, done from here.
Want to go deeper?
Read our perspectives.
What we're thinking, building, and reading at the frontier of AI-native services.
Browse perspectives→
Engineering·Sydney·Permanent
Founding AI Engineer
Location
Sydney CBD
- in-person 4 days/week
Permanent
Team
Engineering
Compensation
Market-leading equity comp commensurate with experience
Build with consequence.
We're rebuilding entire businesses with AI from the inside out. You're building the platform that powers them.
Dragonfly is an AI-native holding company built for the long term. We acquire people-intensive services businesses across Australia and New Zealand and turn them into AI-native operations. The platform you build runs every business we own today, and every one we acquire next.
The platform is the product. The businesses we own are the proving grounds. Frontier stack, founder-level autonomy, feedback loops measured in days — not quarters.
The role
Founding engineer. Impact compounds with every acquisition.
The work spans the hardest parts of applied AI — the parts that aren't solved yet. Turning deep tacit operational expertise into systems that can act on it. Building agents that handle complex, multi-step decisions at scale. Designing knowledge representation that compounds as the portfolio grows. Running evals under production SLAs.
You work shoulder-to-shoulder with operators inside the businesses. That's where the signal is. Your job is to build the platform; theirs is to tell you what to build next and confirm when it's working.
Some weeks that's a quick win that removes friction overnight. Others, it's architecting foundations that reshape how every business in the portfolio runs. You'll move between both.
What you'll do
Ship the platform, end-to-end.
- 01Design multi-agent systems that automate complex, multi-step operations end-to-end.
- 02Build the core AI platform — knowledge graphs, structured representations, RAG, agentic orchestration, evals, production deployment.
- 03Codify what works into platform primitives. One solution, every business.
- 04Own production rigour — cost, latency, reliability, evals. The work that makes AI actually usable at scale.
- 05Move fluently between tactical wins and durable platform work. You know which, when.
Entrepreneurial. AI-native. Pragmatic.
01
Entrepreneurial.
Founder, founding engineer, or someone who has operated with genuine ownership. You see a problem and close it. You don't need permission.
02
Deep in AI.
You've built with LLMs and agents in production. You ship with the frontier — not because you've mastered it, but because you chase it. You read, tinker, rebuild on weekends.
03
Full-stack & AI-native.
You ship end-to-end systems — data layer, AI orchestration and harness, backend, frontend, cloud. You amplify your output with AI development tools.
04
Product instincts.
You build things operators actually want to use. You have taste for how software should feel in someone's hands — not just whether it returns the right JSON.
05
At home in messy systems.
Legacy data, incomplete information, broken integrations, the gap between what the spec says and what the database actually contains. You know how to build systems that work inside it.
06
Pragmatic.
You've shipped ugly things that worked and elegant things that shipped on time. You know the difference matters.
07
Low ego. High standards.
You give and take direct feedback. You're willing to be wrong. You hold the bar high — for yourself and everyone around you.
08
Sydney-based.
We build in person.
Why join
Why here. Why now.
01
Frontier work, real stakes.
Every system you build runs against real operations, real revenue, real customers. Feedback loops are brutal and fast. You'll get better at this faster than anywhere else.
02
Small, elite team.
Founders, engineers, and operators who've built and scaled companies of consequence. The highest bar you've encountered — and everyone holds it.
03
World-class advisors.
Engineers and researchers behind groundbreaking AI research and some of the most transformational products shipped. They mentor, develop, and help shape the technical vision.
04
Autonomy, not permission.
Flat team. No committees. The decision is yours and the outcome is yours. The absence of permission-seeking is the point.
05
Asymmetric by design.
Operating cashflows plus venture upside. Founding equity in a firm built to be huge.
06
Permanent capital.
Built to compound over decades. No fundraise treadmill, no exit pressure.
07
Proudly Australian.
We're putting Australia on the frontier of applied AI. Elite work, done from here.
Want to go deeper?
Read our perspectives.
What we're thinking, building, and reading at the frontier of AI-native services.
Browse perspectives→