Lead Engineer, Engineering Productivity

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.

As a Lead Engineer for Engineering Productivity, your customers are our Software and Machine Learning engineers. You will focus on the modernisation, effectiveness and reliability of our development loops to unlock engineering velocity and satisfaction.

As Neara scales, you will collaborate on the evolution from manual systems to an AI-forward, resilient, scalable platform. You will design and deliver modern CI/CD, improve developer experience, reduce feedback cycles, and embed security and reliability into the development lifecycle. Success means happy engineers, faster iteration, safer releases, and an engineering organization that can scale without friction.

You will educate and enable our engineering organisation with new tools and best practices, unlocking the ability for other engineers to build upon and scale your work further. You will also provide mentorship to other engineers, fostering a collaborative and innovative work environment that encourages continuous learning and growth.

At Neara, you will be part of a team that values your ideas, supports your development, and celebrates your successes. If you are motivated and results-driven, we’d like to meet you.

What You Will Do:

• Lead the architecture and evolution of our inner and outer developer loop—covering build orchestration, dependency management, and large monorepo workflows—to support rapid iteration at scale and the improvement of developer productivity.

• Evolve our software engineering practices to leverage AI-enabled productivity—forging the way forward with tools and techniques and bringing the team along with you.

• Create a measurement-driven culture to diagnose and resolve complex and ambiguous challenges across core infrastructure and developer tooling, using deep systems expertise and low-level profiling, tracing, and debugging techniques.

• Lead cross-team, cross-organization initiatives to reduce friction in the development lifecycle and address systemic risks, and enable teams to scale safely and efficiently.

• Partner closely with product management, engineering leadership, and senior stakeholders to define long-term technical strategy for engineering productivity.

• Lead and mentor engineers to grow domain expertise, empowering the broader engineering organization to collaborate effectively and deliver on these initiatives.

About you:

• Proven track record of building and operating large-scale, production-grade systems, with deep expertise in systems programming, infrastructure platforms, or developer tooling.

• Proven track record of leading complex, high-impact technical initiatives that span multiple teams and materially improve developer productivity.

• Experience designing infrastructure or internal platforms as products, with strong empathy for developer workflows and usability.

• Deep understanding of modern build system architectures (such as Bazel, Gradle, Cargo, etc) with experience in areas such as dependency modelling, incremental builds, caching and remote execution.

• Strong communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to influence technical direction and align stakeholders without direct authority.

• Demonstrated ability to operate effectively in ambiguous problem spaces and make sound architectural decisions with incomplete information.

• Continuous learner with a passion for improving engineering effectiveness at scale.

What we offer:

• Competitive salary & meaningful ESOP

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

• Regular office events

• The real benefit is working on a genuinely complex, innovative and industry-leading product, making a genuine difference in the world around us.

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

Please note that you will require current and unrestricted working rights to be considered for the role. Unfortunately, we are not in a position to offer visa sponsorship at this time.

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