Robert
Spargo

Robert is a software engineer specialising in Generative AI and enterprise agentic systems, with deep hands-on experience across the Microsoft Azure ecosystem — including Azure AI Foundry, Azure AI Studio, Azure AI Search, Azure CosmosDB, Azure Function Apps, and Azure Key Vault. He holds Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) and Azure Data Fundamentals (DP-900) certifications and has deployed, maintained, and iterated on production Azure workloads across multiple organisations.

Robert's GenAI engineering capability spans the full delivery lifecycle: designing and implementing RAG pipelines, complex LLM chaining data flows, agentic orchestration systems, and MLOps practices. Most recently as AI Lead at OQEA, he owned agentic application design and LLM pipeline architecture for AI-assisted healthcare diagnostics — building secure, ethically compliant AI products in a sensitive domain. Before that, at Deloitte, he led end-to-end delivery of Generative AI web applications at enterprise scale using Azure, FastAPI, and modern frontend stacks.

Equally important for Murdoch's AI Competency Centre mission: Robert has a genuine track record of mentoring and enabling others. At Deloitte he led and mentored small development teams; at OQEA he provides day-to-day technical guidance to colleagues. His strong communication and stakeholder management skills, combined with a background that includes teaching, make him a natural fit for the Citizen AI community-of-practice — coaching and upskilling university staff to confidently adopt AI tools and practices.