Want to be a part of Asia Pacific & Middle East's (APME) largest, most innovative, and rapidly growing data centre company?
AirTrunk is a technology company with a powerful purpose - to scale and sustain the relentless growth of the region’s digital future. We do this by continuously redefining and delivering hyperscale data centres that meet the needs of our customers - the world’s most transformational companies. And we’re doing so sustainably, for today and tomorrow.
Having opened Australia’s first and largest hyperscale data centres in 2017, we set our eyes on rapid expansion and now operate a platform of hyperscale data centres across the APME region. With backing from our investors, including Blackstone, this is just the beginning…
Come join the A-Team at AirTrunk, where the cloud meets the ground.
Snapshot
The Practice Lead – AI & Data Platforms is a senior leadership position responsible for building and scaling the enterprise AI and data platforms at AirTrunk. This role blends strategic architecture, technical leadership, and people development, ensuring the organization’s AI and data platforms and infrastructure are secure, adaptive, and capable of supporting the next wave of intelligent, agentic systems. You will lead a small, high-performing team of engineers to deliver a world class AI and data platform that underpins the company’s analytical, AI, and automation capabilities. As a key member of the AI & Data leadership team, you will work closely with peers across the broader business to deliver a connected AI and data ecosystem that transforms how the business uses data and intelligence to achieve faster growth, sharper efficiency, and better customer outcomes.
Your Day to Day
Strategic Leadership
- Partner with the Senior Director – AI, Automation & Data Insights to define and deliver the enterprise AI & Data Platform strategy, ensuring alignment to business growth and digital transformation priorities.
- Set the architectural vision for a scalable, secure, and intelligent AI and data platform that supports both traditional analytics and emerging agentic AI capabilities.
- Translate strategic goals into a multi-year platform roadmap covering ingestion, compute, AI services, governance, and observability.
- Shape enterprise standards for responsible AI, automation, and data governance in collaboration with Technology and Risk teams.
Platform Ownership & Delivery
- Lead the design, build, and operation of a world class AI and data platform, ensuring reliability, scalability, and cost efficiency across environments.
- Deliver a cohesive platform that supports ingestion from IoT and SaaS sources, low-latency streaming, and ML/AI workloads abstracted through self-service APIs and automation frameworks.
- Enable agentic AI capabilities - intelligent, autonomous systems that can reason, learn, and act safely within defined business and governance constraints.
- Partner with the Practice Lead – Data & AI Products to ensure seamless integration between platform capabilities and business-facing data and AI products.
- Establish clear SLAs/SLOs, observability frameworks, and FinOps discipline for platform performance and spend.
Team Leadership
- Lead, mentor, and grow a multidisciplinary team of engineers.
- Foster a high-performance, high-trust culture focused on innovation, reliability, and collaboration.
- Create clear career pathways and capability frameworks for team members.
- Promote continuous learning, cross-skilling, and knowledge sharing across the wider business.
Governance, Enablement & Collaboration
- Establish platform governance practices including metadata management, lineage, access control, and data contracts to ensure data quality and compliance.
- Build reusable platform components and self-service frameworks that empower and enable fast data for a range of patterns.
- Drive platform observability, auditability, and responsible AI mechanisms to meet operational and regulatory standards.
- Partner with teams across Technology to ensure alignment with enterprise architecture, security, cost controls and risk management.
Business Partnership
- Act as the trusted advisor on AI and data platform strategy to technology and business executives.
- Communicate complex architectural concepts in clear business language, linking platform and infrastructure investments to measurable outcomes.
- Evangelise the role of modern, agentic platforms in driving innovation, automation, and operational intelligence.
Requirements
- 10+ years in data engineering or data platform leadership roles, with 3+ years managing teams that build and operate enterprise data or AI platforms.
- Deep understanding of modern data and AI platform architectures, including lakehouse patterns, event streaming, and ML/AI lifecycle management (experience with Databricks preferred).
- Proven success leading platform transformation initiatives in large, complex, or cloud-native environments (Azure preferred).
- Experience implementing MLOps, model serving, or AI orchestration frameworks.
- Exposure to high-velocity IoT or event-streaming environments.
- Strong grasp of AI enablement and emerging agentic automation concepts - how intelligent agents leverage platform APIs, orchestration, and governance.
- Demonstrated ability to lead multidisciplinary teams and drive cross-functional alignment between data, engineering, and business domains.
- Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills; able to operate confidently at executive level.