Team Lead – AI & Automation

About the Role

We are seeking an experienced AI Development Team Lead to develop, guide, and expand our AI & Automation engineering function within our mobile game development environment. As a Team Lead at Aristocrat, you will have an outstanding opportunity to build the AI capability of a top mobile gaming studio and directly impact how AI changes our development methods and live game ecosystems.

You will oversee a committed team of AI engineers in this role, steering the technical vision, delivering projects, and maintaining operational excellence for AI systems on Unity-based clients and cloud-native backends. Your responsibility includes converting AI strategies into scalable, production-ready solutions that refine game development workflows, improve GameOps efficiency, and enrich player experiences. This position merges strong technical leadership, staff management, collaboration across functions, and hands-on architectural guidance. If advancing AI innovation in gaming excites you, this role is a great fit!

What You'll Do

• Lead, guide, and develop a high-performing AI & Automation engineering team, including solution architects and AI engineers.
• Own the end-to-end delivery of AI initiatives from concept to production deployment.
• Define team objectives, goals and milestones, and delivery roadmaps aligned with business and product strategy.
• Foster a culture of innovation, experimentation, and engineering excellence.
• Provide technical mentoring and career development support to team members.
• Define and evolve the AI technical strategy across backend services and Unity client integrations.
• Deliver architectural supervision for AI-enabled microservices, automation frameworks, and ML pipelines constructed on Google Cloud.
• Ensure scalable, secure, and maintainable AI solutions aligned with cloud-native and event-driven architectural principles.
• Coordinate model lifecycle management, including training, deployment, monitoring, and optimization.
• Drive guidelines in AI governance, model performance monitoring, and responsible AI implementation.
• Identify high-impact AI opportunities across game development, GameOps or equivalent experience, LiveOps, and player engagement.
• Guide the development of machine learning models, predictive analytics systems, tools powered by large language models, and automation frameworks.
• Ensure seamless integration of AI tools, APIs, and services into Unity-based game architectures and backend ecosystems.

What We're Looking For

• 7+ years of experience in software engineering, with substantial experience in systems powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning.
• At least 2 years' experience guiding or supervising engineering teams.
• Solid experience in cloud-native architectures, ideally on Google Cloud (GCP).
• Experience crafting and deploying AI-powered microservices and automation frameworks.
• Solid understanding of event-driven systems, message brokers (Kafka, Pub/Sub, RabbitMQ), and asynchronous architectures.
• Experience with ML lifecycle management, MLOps practices, and model deployment in production environments.
• Proficiency in backend and AI-related programming languages (e.g., Python, C#, Go, JavaScript).
• Experience working in Agile development environments (SCRUM/Kanban).
• Strong leadership, communication, and collaborator management skills.
• Ability to balance hands-on technical involvement with strategic leadership responsibilities.

Nice to Have

• Experience in the gaming sector or a strong enthusiasm for game creation.
• Familiarity with Unity workflows and client-server integrations.
• Expertise in AI/ML frameworks (e.g., TensorFlow, PyTorch, OpenAI, or similar).
• Experience implementing LLM-based tools, generative AI solutions, or advanced analytics in production.
• Experience building internal AI platforms or developer efficiency tooling.

Why Aristocrat?

Aristocrat is a world leader in gaming content and technology, and a top-tier publisher of free-to-play mobile games. We deliver great performance for our B2B customers and bring joy to the lives of the millions of people who love to play our casino and mobile games. And while we focus on fun, we never forget our responsibilities. We strive to lead the way in responsible gameplay, and to lift the bar in company governance, employee wellbeing and sustainability. We’re a diverse business united by shared values and an inspiring mission to bring joy to life through the power of play.

We aim to create an environment where individual differences are valued, and all employees have the opportunity to realize their potential. We welcome and encourage applications from all people regardless of age, gender, race, ethnicity, cultural background, disability status or LGBTQ+ identity. EEO M/F/D/V

• World Leader in Gaming Entertainment

• Robust benefits package

• Global career opportunities

Our Values

• All about the Player

• Talent Unleashed

• Collective Brilliance

• Good Business Good Citizen

Travel Expectations

None

Additional Information

At this time, we are unable to sponsor work visas for this position. Candidates must be authorized to work in the job posting location for this position on a full-time basis without the need for current or future visa sponsorship.