We're hey buddy, a fast-growing, founder-led AI startup reshaping the future of hospitality. Our mission? Fix the broken dining experience - for good.

Founded by the teams behind Dimmi and me&u, we’re building an AI-driven concierge and commerce platform that empowers venues to operate smarter and customers to experience dining the way it should be: seamless, personal, and a little bit magical.

We're in the early stages but already working with some of Australia’s leading hospo groups - and growing fast. If you want to help build something ambitious from the ground up, and you're not afraid to get your hands dirty while thinking big, this might be the one.

About the Role

We’re looking for a world-class, hands-on AI/ ML Engineer to join the founding team at hey buddy — a product-led AI company building the future of hospitality. You’ll own the design, training, deployment, and optimisation of machine learning systems that are core to the product and directly tied to our ability to scale as a Profitable Efficient Growth (PEG) business.

You will lead ML engineering across both generative and predictive models — with full responsibility for data infrastructure, model selection, real-time inference performance, and seamless integration into a live product used by hospitality operators at scale.

This is a rare opportunity to help shape the technical and product direction of a category-defining company from the ground up, alongside a proven team of engineers, product leaders, and founders who’ve done this before.

What You’ll Do

• Train and fine-tune large language models and predictive ML systems
• Deploy scalable, real-time inference systems in production
• Build dynamic data pipelines that power the product and user experience
• Own the design of our data lake and business intelligence layer
• Choose and refine pre-trained models - and know when to build customer
• Work side-by-side with product and engineering to deliver high-impact features
• Brings structure and vision to all things ML and data

Who you are

Technical Expertise

• Extensive experience training and deploying ML models in production (LLMs, classification, regression, clustering, etc.)
• Deep knowledge of PyTorch, TensorFlow, and associated ML tooling (e.g., Hugging Face, LangChain, Weights & Biases)
• Strong experience working with real-time data pipelines, streaming infrastructure, and event-based systems
• Production deployment experience using cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) including containerisation, inference APIs, and scaling tools
• Fluency in Python and SQL; experience writing robust, maintainable ML code in production systems

Mindset & Attributes

• Owner mentality: You take responsibility for outcomes and systems, not just tasks
• Product-first thinking: You care deeply about user experience and performance, not just models in isolation
• High agency and initiative: You drive projects from zero to one in ambiguous, fast-paced environments
• Collaborative by default: You love working closely with product, engineering, and design to build something bigger than yourself
• Comfort in ambiguity: You thrive in unstructured environments and help others bring clarity

Bonus points if you have:

• Experience in hospitality tech, retail ops platforms, or real-time B2B SaaS
• Knowledge of tools like Airflow, dbt, Snowflake, PostHog, or Segment
• Contributions to open-source ML/ AI projects or research
• Strong intuition for human-centric applications of AI/ ML

Why join us?

- Work directly with founders who’ve scaled hospo-tech before

- Get in early and help define what we build and how we build it

- Join a team that moves fast, dreams big, and cares deeply

- Own a piece of the company with meaningful equity

- Flexible working: we’re based in Sydney, but this role can be anywhere in Australia