AI Scientist

Role Overview

National Australia Bank is looking for an AI Scientist to help define the structure, testing approach, and technical standards for its AI function. This position is geared toward hands-on practitioners who can move beyond prototypes and deliver dependable business results with advanced AI, including large language models and agent-based systems, in secure, repeatable, enterprise-ready deployments.

In this role, you will join a team focused on building customer-centric AI capabilities with strong attention to trust, reliability, and scale. You will work across the AI portfolio with AI engineers, product leaders, and subject matter experts to turn ideas into production outcomes.

Key Responsibilities

• Build the foundational components for NAB’s agentic AI products, including reasoning loops, tool interfaces, memory, context handling, and orchestration.
• Turn solution designs into durable, well-tested, production-quality implementations that sit between data science and software engineering.
• Work with Product, Engineering, and Platform teams to convert AI capability into clear business value.
• Create prompting approaches, retrieval pipelines, and context-building methods that shape the accuracy and dependability of agent responses.
• Introduce strong evaluation practices for probabilistic AI systems, including offline assessments and online experiments.
• Make sure AI outputs are explainable, auditable, and consistent with NAB’s Responsible AI principles.
• Set up robust monitoring across AI systems, including drift tracking, anomaly detection, and incident categorisation.
• Run fast experiments to validate agent design choices, learn what performs well or poorly, and build the evidence needed for architectural decisions.

What You Need to Bring

• Proven experience shipping applied AI or machine learning solutions to production, ideally with exposure to LLMs and agent-based architectures.
• Practical capability in automated evaluation workflows, runtime safeguards, and CI/CD integration for AI systems.
• Experience working in cloud-native environments and partnering with cross-functional product, engineering, and risk teams.
• Ability to navigate ambiguity while balancing speed, safety, and business impact in complex enterprise settings.
• Strong grounding in statistics, probability, and experimental design, with the ability to build rigorous tests, assess results critically, and measure uncertainty.
• Working knowledge of prompt engineering, context engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, tool-use patterns, and agent orchestration; direct hands-on experience is strongly preferred.

Why This Role Matters

• You will help shape how AI is trusted, governed, and scaled across NAB.
• You will influence the next generation of NAB’s AI platforms by establishing technical standards that last beyond a single use case.
• You will combine deep technical expertise with enterprise impact, delivering AI that customers and regulators can trust.

Inclusion and Workplace Culture

NAB places strong value on equity, respect, and authenticity at work. The organisation aims to create an environment where colleagues feel recognised and appreciated for who they are, supported by Employee Resource Groups and a culture that welcomes diverse backgrounds and identities.

The company is also committed to flexible ways of working and encourages an environment where people can work in a way that suits them.

Recruitment and Accessibility

For information about the hiring process, accessibility support, or alternative ways to apply, candidates are directed to the employer’s careers page. If you need workplace adjustments, you can contact the NAB Careers team and reference the job number.

Additional Notes

Candidate screening and interviews may take place before the closing date of the advertisement. Unsolicited CVs from recruitment agencies will not be accepted.