Agentic AI Engineer Recruitment

FleetGuru.ai, a B2B software scale-up on the Gold Coast, hired a Principal Agentic AI Lead through Digitalent, brought in to set the enterprise AI strategy and design the core agentic framework.

This was a location problem before it was a skills problem. Elite AI engineers are scarce on the Gold Coast in a way they are not in Sydney or Melbourne, and the brief needed a PhD-level architect willing to commit to a scale-up rather than a lab or a major. It also had to be someone senior enough to define the enterprise AI strategy and design the core agentic framework rather than execute somebody else’s, and to do that to the standard set by an AI product leader who reads twenty research papers a month. People who can do that are rarely looking, and rarely looking outside a capital city.

A marathon search rather than a fast one. The hire set the enterprise AI strategy, designed the core agentic framework and built the foundational data pipelines, then delivered a multilingual document extraction pipeline now heading for production. They are today the Lead AI Engineer and second in command on AI, and they are the reason the next hire could be briefed properly.

An AI lab in Los Angeles working on computer use and autonomous agents hired its founding Forward Deployed Engineer through Digitalent, a role sitting between research and customer-facing delivery that draws from a very small pool.

The engineer embeds on a client site three to five days a week and owns the relationship alone, so the brief needed production-grade agentic engineering and consulting-level client handling in the same person. The company was also in stealth, which left no brand to open a conversation with, and several agencies were briefed on the same roles.

Ours was the only candidate to clear every stage, across all the agencies briefed, and the only placement any of them made. The client came back with an expanded brief of a further 8 to 12 engineers across Los Angeles and a new Manhattan office, and moved the engagement onto an exclusive footing. A single contingent hire became an ongoing partnership across both coasts.