AI Engineer

Catapult is building the future of sports performance technology, with a mission to Unleash the Potential of every athlete and team on earth. We don't just work in the sporting industry; we are actively changing it.  Since 2006, our solutions have been leading the way in sports performance software, science, and data, in a world where 1% can literally mean the difference between winning and losing.

We work with over 5,000+ teams around the world, empowering coaches, managers and trainers in premier teams in the NFL, NBA, NHL, MLS, EPL, AFL, NRL, NCAA and more. We provide the information they need to optimise athletes’ health, game-day readiness, and performance, as well as in-game tactics.  

Catapult is a sports technology company that empowers professional teams to make data-driven decisions. We deliver health, performance, video, and AI insights from the locker room to competitive environments, ensuring every decision is an opportunity to gain an advantage, sharpen performance, and build lasting success. 

WE WANT PEOPLE WHO ARE PASSIONATE ABOUT USING ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE TO BUILD AMAZING PRODUCTS

We are looking for an AI Engineer who thinks creatively about AI-assisted development, is still on a steep growth trajectory, and wants to learn AI architecture as their native mental model rather than retrofitting it onto pre-AI-era engineering habits. Based in Melbourne, you will orchestrate AI-assisted workflows against bounded specifications under an opinionated scaffold that catches the bugs experience usually catches. This is a small team with executive sponsorship building both Catapult's customer-facing intelligence platform and the internal tooling that makes Catapult engineering durable. If you operate well within strong structure and have genuine curiosity about how AI architecture is reshaping the engineering discipline, we should talk.

The AI engineering role at Catapult is structurally different from a conventional engineering role: you will not write code line-by-line all day. Your job is to direct AI-assisted workflows against bounded problems, review the output, surface architectural decisions that need escalation upward, and capture learnings back into the team's shared knowledge as work surfaces them.

The work spans:

• The customer-facing intelligence platform (knowledge graph, context synthesis pipeline, evaluation infrastructure)
• The internal AI tooling (our internal MCPs)
• Integration plumbing (auth, ingestion, data flows from all Catapult sources, Cognito-fronted endpoints)
• Multi-agent reasoning systems (different AI perspectives debating over the same knowledge base)

WHAT YOU’LL DO 

• Query the team's knowledge MCP (Model Context Protocol, the Anthropic standard for AI tools to access external services) for relevant practices and decisions before acting; capture decisions back as work surfaces them.
• Produce verified output. Hardware test or end-to-end validation as part of "done." No "looks correct" judgments. We care about the quality of our product deeply.
• Help productise multi-agent reasoning: different agent perspectives orchestrated over a shared knowledge base.

WHAT YOU’LL NEED

Required (you won't tick every box -- we're looking for the person, not the checklist):

• High trajectory You've grown fast in the last 2 years, demonstrably, with concrete examples.
• Creative judgment You can evaluate code or design choices and articulate what's good and bad about them. Show us a piece of code in an interview; we'll ask you to evaluate it, not fix it.
• Genuine curiosity about AI architecture Not "uses AI tools." Architectures AI tools into your workflow. You have opinions about how AI architecture is reshaping the engineering discipline, and those opinions are grounded in attempted use rather than reading.
• Strong fundamentals in at least one systems language (Go, Rust, C++) and one scripting language (Python, TypeScript) We care about engineering judgment more than language fluency; the scaffold helps you ramp on a new language quickly.
• 2-5 years professional production engineering experience You have enough experience to have developed your own judgment, but not so much that pre-AI-era patterns are deeply ingrained.

Highly valued (same rule -- we're looking for the person, not the checklist):

• Direct experience with AI-assisted coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot, Aider) deeply enough to have developed your own opinions about their failure modes.
• Experience with Neo4j or other graph databases.
• Experience with Cognito, OAuth federation, or JWT-based identity flows.
• Experience with Go MCP servers, Python data ingestion, or AWS infrastructure.
• Familiarity with sports data, sensor systems, or wearable technology. Not required, but helpful.
• Open-source contribution history that shows trajectory + creative judgment.

Anti-profile (worth being explicit about):

• Engineer whose primary mode is following established methodology rather than thinking creatively about it. Many engineering roles reward rule-following; this one rewards creative judgment within structure.
• "Used Cursor once" candidates whose AI-tooling familiarity is shallow. We're looking for genuine architectural curiosity, not exposure.

WHY CATAPULT? 

• We have amazing people. We promise you’ll work with some of the most ambitious,  intelligent people in an exciting industry, and do some of the best work of your life.
• We encourage our people to engage in constructive, open, and honest communication to make Catapult extraordinary. 
• We work in a collaborative yet challenging environment to consistently improve our performance, which in turn impacts our customers' performance.
• Our workforce spans more than 20 countries. You'll have the opportunity to work with people from multiple nationalities and cultures, and to build your global awareness.  
• We value improvement and development. We are challenging ourselves to continuously grow and become a high-performance company. That means we maintain a growth mindset in everything we do, and our people are always looking for ways to improve.  There is an unlimited opportunity to grow, do more, and do better.

Whether you’re interested in sports or not, you’ll have the satisfaction of knowing your work is supporting some of the most successful teams and athletes on the planet! 

Research shows that while men apply for jobs when they meet an average of 60% of the criteria, women and other marginalised groups tend only to apply when they check every box. So if you have what it takes, but don't meet every single point in our job ad, please still get in touch! We would love to have a chat and see if you could be a great addition to our team. We are building the future of sports performance. Our priority is to find the brightest talent who can add to our team culture, actively contribute, and be excited about what they do.

All offers of employment are subject to Catapult's positive prehire check. To find out more, please contact the Talent Partner for this role.