We place AI specialists.
Nothing else.
Gradient Search is a specialist search firm for one market: the engineers, scientists and leaders building AI in Australia. Assessed by people who understand the work, backed by the country's most transparent process — and its longest guarantee.
Five practices. One market.
AI hiring fails at the taxonomy: 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
Speed claims are cheap. Ours are contractual: the clock and the guarantee are written into our terms of business, because the most common failure in Australian AI hiring is process drift — 7–10 day gaps between stages while the best candidate accepts elsewhere.
Scope against the taxonomy · day 0
We define the role against our practice taxonomy — what it owns, what "good" looks like in twelve months, and what it should cost, priced from our own Australian data.
Search the assessed network · days 1–5
Searches start from continuously interviewed, mapped talent — not a job ad. First shortlist in five business days.
Dual-run interviews · week 1–2
A principal leads every interview; our interview system sits second chair, ensuring complete rubric coverage. Each shortlist ships with a transcript-cited technical evidence pack.
Close inside the window · week 2–3
Four stages in under three weeks, managed against the calendar. Offer support priced from real comparables, not folklore.
Guaranteed for six months · ongoing
If a placement doesn't hold within six months, we replace them. The market standard is thirteen weeks — our assessment depth is why we can put this in writing.
The report Australia doesn't have
Every Australian AI salary guide is gated marketing with undisclosed methodology. The Australian AI Salary & Talent Report is built the only credible way: individually interviewed professionals, stated sample, published method — free and ungated, annually.