Engineering Team Lead, Risk & Value Optimisation (RVO)

Neara is a software technology company that provides a physics-enabled digital twin platform specifically designed for electric utility infrastructure. The platform enables utilities to create a behaviourally identical digital model of their entire network, integrating assets, surrounding terrain, weather conditions, and vegetation into a single physics-accurate environment. This allows network operators to simulate real-world scenarios including severe weather events, wildfires, floods, and equipment failures to understand risk, predict outcomes, and prioritize interventions before incidents occur. Neara's mission centers on improving the resilience, safety, and efficiency of energy infrastructure, which directly supports the clean energy transition by helping utilities manage aging grids, reduce outages, and enable the integration of renewable energy sources. The platform addresses critical climate-related challenges such as wildfire mitigation, storm response, and flood management, making it a key tool for utilities facing increasing climate-driven grid risks. By replacing fragmented point solutions with a unified model, Neara helps reduce the environmental and financial costs associated with infrastructure failures and inefficient maintenance. What distinguishes Neara is its use of physics-based simulation rather than statistical approximation, enabling users to move from broad risk awareness to precise failure prediction and actionable planning. The platform supports a wide range of use cases including vegetation analysis, clearance risk assessment, conductor clashing detection, asset lifecycle management, distribution and transmission network design, and regulatory reporting. Neara operates across multiple geographies including the United States, Europe, and Australia and New Zealand, serving major electric utilities seeking to modernize their network management capabilities.

Imagine having the power to stress-test an entire power grid against a hurricane or thunderstorm before the clouds even gather. That is the reality we are creating at Neara.

We use advanced machine learning to create engineering-grade, physics enabled digital twins of electricity grids across four continents, this helps asset owners understand their biggest challenges and bring the most viable solutions to life across millions of kilometres of infrastructure.

By simulating extreme weather and structural stress at a network-wide scale, we empower the world’s largest utilities to pinpoint risks, optimise investments and build a more resilient global energy future.

Our team is a collection of brilliant minds who are fanatical about making a tangible difference in the real world, utilising AI and machine learning to accelerate everything from data classification to complex scenario analysis. We have built a special culture where innovation thrives because everyone owns the mission and we need smart, creative people to help us scale this impact to every corner of the globe.

Risk & Value Optimisation (RVO), Neara's most strategic product, is an analytics platform that puts a true cost on utilities' assets, and on the decisions about how to manage and operate them. It is used by customers to:

• Understand their risk exposure today.

• Simulate investment, policy & environmental changes, and the impact those changes will have on total ownership costs.

• Optimise their budget balancing risk exposure and capital and operational expenses.

Which enables them to:

• Manage their aging infrastructure and associated risks, and the significant costs in upgrading it.

• Respond effectively to both near-term and long-term challenges in their environment.

• Create defensible and explainable investment programs to withstand regulator scrutiny.

We're looking for a Engineering Team Lead to lead the engineering team building RVO. This is a people-first leadership role with strong technical depth - around 60% leading people and driving delivery, 40% hands-on in the code and system design.

RVO is a greenfield solution, so there's real room to shape its architecture and direction from the ground up. You'll bring strong product sense and keep the team focused on real customer outcomes rather than code for its own sake. We don't do hypothetical, and neither should you.

What You'll Do

• Own delivery end to end: plan and execute work across one or more quarters, set clear goals with your team and hold them to account, and make sure work ships reliably, sustainably, and in full.

• Lead, grow, and mentor the team: develop ~3 engineers (in a cross-functional team of ~5) in their craft and quality of execution, support their career growth, and guide architecture, decision-making, and technical scaffolding - setting the standard for communication, accountability, and engineering culture. Your technical leadership and influence lifts others building on RVO too, including Customer Success - beyond your direct reports.

• Stay hands-on where you multiply the team: contribute to system design and architectural decisions, and write and review production-quality code across performance-critical, data-intensive components. This isn't a hands-off role: you'll lead best by understanding the substance.

• Own the technical core of RVO: Balance what lives in our core engineering platform versus the application layer, so the solution stays performant, flexible, and maintainable as it grows.

• Work with complex, large-scale data: shape the ingestion and data structures that synthesise disparate sources (GIS, LiDAR, asset condition, historical failures) with a rich geospatial library, across very large networks.

• Partner across the business, and look ahead: work closely with Product, Deployment, Customer Success, and Sales, and get in front of customers to understand the problems utilities face. Spot the platform capabilities other teams own that RVO will depend on, and line them up before your team needs them.

• Raise the bar across engineering: influence best practices, tooling, and long-term platform direction, and help scale Neara's engineering culture as we grow.

Who You Are

• A software engineering & people leader who's owned delivery end to end: comfortable operating across engineering and product, accountable for outcomes not just outputs, and experienced leading, mentoring, and growing engineers at multiple levels.

• You get up to speed fast in unfamiliar territory: you've walked into a technical area you didn't already know, built context without hand-holding, found the heart of the problem, and delivered. This aptitude matters most to us.

• Product sense, and a strong partner to Product: you keep the team focused on customer outcomes, and stay close to what utilities actually face - bringing an engineering perspective to hard, open-ended problems rather than waiting to be handed them.

• You plan a route, then adapt as you learn: you've delivered ambitious, complex projects incrementally - shipping real progress along the way and changing course on evidence rather than clinging to the original plan.

• Deep technical credibility: a strong track record architecting and shipping complex, production-grade systems, with the judgement to go deep and make sound trade-offs without out-experting the specialists.

• Formal grounding: a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Mathematics, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

• No-ego, outcome-oriented, and detail-obsessed: our work influences large-scale investment decisions, so we deliver polished, pristine outcomes, and we always have each other's backs.

Nice to have

• Experience leading software teams on financial, investment, statistical modelling or other analysis-heavy, regulated products.

• Exposure to geospatial systems, utilities, energy, simulation, or physics-based platforms; and strong mathematical reasoning or a mechanical, civil, or electrical engineering background.

Why work here

• Competitive salary + ESOP. Significant career development and growth opportunities.

• Fully flexible working arrangements with a well-stocked office in Redfern.

• Annual company-wide offsite.

• Highly meritocratic, non-bureaucratic, and no-ego work culture.

• The opportunity to work on complex, meaningful products and real-world problems.

• The opportunity to play a direct, critical role in the trajectory of a high growth company.

• Neara values diversity, belonging, and equal employment opportunities. We encourage individuals from all backgrounds to apply.

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