Head of Data

MaincodeMelbourneOn-siteFull-time30 Sept 2026

Maincode is hiring a hands-on Head of Data in Melbourne to build and scale the data pipelines behind Matilda, an Australian-made AI stack. You will own web-scale crawling, filtering, deduplication, and agent-driven dataset creation for frontier model training. Requires strong Python plus Go, Rust, or C++, distributed data processing, and large-scale crawling experience.

What you'll do

Build, run, and scale crawlers and scrapers for web scale collection, including specialized crawlers for high value, hard to reach sources such as legislation, regulator guidance, government publications, local media, and community forums.
Develop robust pipelines for extraction, filtering, cleaning, deduplication, and formatting to ensure the highest quality inputs for model training.
Build agentic pipelines where AI agents generate, annotate, critique, and verify data at scale, with the evaluation and spot checks needed to trust what they produce.
Turn a market's requirements, from its laws and regulators to its cultural norms and governance expectations, into dataset specifications, data mixtures, and evaluations we can measure against.
Work directly with our core training team to iterate on data mixtures, evaluate data quality, and respond to model performance feedback.
Track provenance, licensing, privacy, and security for every dataset you ship.
Set the technical direction and help hire the engineers who join you as the work grows.

What you need

Must-have

PythonGoRustC++Apache SparkRayApache BeamWeb crawling

Nice-to-have

Pre-training datasetsPost-training datasetsSFTPreference dataReinforcement learning dataMultilingual dataRegional dataCulturally specific data

Soft skills

Bias for shippingTechnical leadershipMentoringFast executionQuality focus

Data EngineeringAILLMWeb CrawlingPythonMelbourneOn-siteFull-timeSoftware DevelopmentLead

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Must-have

Nice-to-have

Soft skills

What you'll do

What you need