AI Platform Tech Lead (Apigee X & Multi Cloud)

At NCS Australia, we believe in doing technology services better. Our commitment to quality, focus on people, and willingness to challenge traditional thinking set us apart. Our team brings this belief to life by partnering with our clients and communities to make tomorrow together.

We are committed to creating an environment that prioritises innovation, collaboration, and purposeful work. Our diverse team is empowered to make a meaningful impact with curiosity, creativity and resilience to shape better outcomes. Join us and accept the challenge of creating a better tomorrow.

The Role

We are seeking a hands-on AI Platform Tech Lead to bridge solution architecture and shipped deliverables. You will lead the day-to-day engineering efforts across the gateway, enabling a team of developers, while driving build, test, and release momentum.

While this is a technical leadership position rather than a people-management role, you will guide technical direction, unblock engineers, establish standards, and own epics, runbooks, PRDs, and stakeholder updates.

About the Project

We are building a cutting-edge Apigee X AI Gateway designed to front large language model (LLM) inference and emerging agentic patterns (such as MCP and A2A). The gateway connects consumers from multiple clouds and enterprise networks, routes requests to inference providers, and abstracts provider specifics behind OpenAI-compatible interfaces.

What You Will Lead

• Technical Leadership & Delivery: Translate architectural blueprints into buildable epics, user stories, and implementation plans. Own gateway capabilities end-to-end, including API contracts, integration patterns, consumer onboarding, and provider abstractions.

• AI Gateway Engineering: Design, build, and harden product-grade API capabilities on Apigee X for AI inference and agentic workloads. Implement OpenAI-compatible patterns (streaming, embeddings, tool calling, multi-turn conversations).

• Multi-Cloud Provider Abstraction: Build extensible patterns to integrate and abstract AI model providers, starting with Vertex AI and AWS Bedrock. Implement request transformation, routing, metering, observability, and failover mechanics.

• Team Enablement & Engineering Quality: Mentor and unblock 3-4 engineers through code reviews, clarifying designs, setting standards, and establishing maintainable CI/CD, testing, and documentation discipline.

• GCP Platform & Security: Work hands-on with GCP services (Apigee X, IAM, Networking, Logging, Monitoring, Cloud Run/GKE). Build Infrastructure as Code using Terraform and ensure all gateway traffic is secured across multi-cloud and enterprise networks.

• Stakeholder Coordination: Own updates on build progress, risks, and blockers for product managers and architects while liaising with platform and security teams.

Core Requirements:

• API & Gateway Expertise: Strong background designing REST APIs and API gateway solutions, with hands-on experience using enterprise API management tools (preferably Apigee X).

• AI & LLM Integration: Practical experience integrating LLM APIs and model platforms (prompts, chat, streaming, embeddings, tool/function calling) and understanding multi-provider abstraction layers.

• GCP & IaC Proficiency: Solid knowledge of Google Cloud Platform (IAM, networking, logging/monitoring) and strong Terraform skills in production environments.

• Security & Multi-Cloud: Familiarity with OAuth 2.0, API keys, workload identity, and securing traffic arriving from external clouds or enterprise networks (e.g., Zscaler).

• Agentic Frameworks: Exposure to agentic frameworks and protocols (e.g., MCP, A2A, or equivalent).

• Technical Ownership: Excellent communication skills, clear technical writing (PRDs, runbooks), and the ability to drive delivery pressure while making pragmatic technical decisions.

Nice to Have:

• Direct production experience with Apigee X.

• Deep experience with Vertex AI or AWS Bedrock.

• Familiarity with LLM gateway tools/abstractions (e.g., LiteLLM).

• Background in SRE/platform reliability or usage metering/chargeback mechanisms.

Why join us:

NCS Australia is where you can feel at home, nurturing your talents and skills as we make tomorrow together, one day at a time. Our benefits include paid parental leave, initiatives focused on your well-being and discounted health insurance. You will also enjoy discounts on various products and services and be regularly recognised and rewarded for high performance. We are committed to your career development through our Capability Fingerprint, industry and partner training programs, special interest groups, and an AI-driven learning platform. No matter where you are in your career, we offer meaningful work and opportunities for growth.

NCS Australia is an equal-opportunity employer, and we take pride in our commitment to valuing and supporting our people and the communities we serve.We are dedicated to attracting, retaining and developing our people regardless of gender identity, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability and age. Applications are encouraged from all sectors of the community and we strongly encourage applications from the Veterans, Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander community.

At NCS Australia, we are committed to supporting adjustments throughout the recruitment and selection process, as well as during employment. We actively support and encourage people with disability to apply.

Agencies:

We’ve got this. We request that you do not contact NCS employees outside of the Talent Acquisition team. NCS exclusively accepts resumes from agencies on our preferred supplier panel through the NCS Agency Portal. Agencies that submit resumes must have a valid fee agreement and be assigned to the particular requisition by the Talent Acquisition team. Any resumes that are submitted outside of this process will become the sole property of NCS. If a candidate is hired outside of this process, no fee or payment will be given.

Work rights and background checks:

To be eligible for a position with us, applicants will need to have valid work rights for Australia and be willing to undergo a comprehensive background checking process, including probity and police checks