We place AI specialists.
Nothing else.
Gradient Search is Australia's specialist recruitment firm for artificial intelligence. One market, five practices, permanent and contract - delivered with the rigour of executive search and terms no generalist will put in writing.
Five practices. One market.
AI hiring fails at role definition: a research scientist, an LLM application engineer and an ML platform engineer are three different careers, priced differently and assessed differently. Most job specs conflate them. We don't.
Applied AI & LLM Engineering
Engineers who ship LLM-backed systems to production - retrieval, agents, evals, fine-tuning - not research for its own sake.
A$160k – A$280k packageML Platform & Infrastructure
The engineers who make everyone else’s models real: training and inference infrastructure, MLOps, GPU economics, AI security.
A$170k – A$300k packageData & Applied Science
Data scientists, applied scientists and research engineers who turn data into decisions and models into measurable outcomes.
A$150k – A$260k packageAI Product & Delivery
Product managers, solutions architects and delivery leads who can scope what models can actually do - and ship it.
A$170k – A$280k packageAI Governance & Leadership
Heads of AI, responsible-AI and AI-risk leaders - the roles a regulated market now requires and almost nobody can find.
A$180k – A$400k packageA process you can hold us to
Anyone can claim speed and quality. We put both in our terms of business - because the most common failure in Australian AI hiring is drift: weeks between interview stages while the strongest candidate accepts elsewhere.
Define the role properly · day 0
Before we search, we agree what the role owns, what success looks like in twelve months, and what it should cost - benchmarked against our own Australian compensation data, not folklore.
Search the network · days 1–10
Our searches begin with specialists we have already interviewed - the same one-on-one interviews that build the Australian AI Salary & Talent Report dataset, mapped across all five practices - not a job advertisement posted after you sign. A qualified shortlist within ten business days, in writing.
Assess with evidence · days 1–10
Every interview is led by a principal and rigorously documented. Each shortlisted candidate is presented with a full assessment record - the evidence behind our judgement, not just a formatted CV.
Manage the close · weeks 3–5
Interview loops are booked with your panel before the shortlist is presented - so four stages complete inside three weeks, and any slippage is visible and chased the day it happens. Offer construction advised from real Australian comparables.
Stand behind it · six months
If a placed candidate resigns, or you exit them for performance, within six months, we run the replacement search at no fee. The only exclusions - redundancy and material change to the role - are stated in our terms, not discovered in them.
The report Australia doesn't have
Australia has no AI-specific compensation benchmark with a stated sample and a published method. The Australian AI Salary & Talent Reportwill be exactly that: individually interviewed professionals, stated sample, published method - free and ungated, every year. First edition: November 2026. The interviews are under way now.