Staff Machine Learning Engineer (Platform)

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.

The Staff Machine Learning Platform Engineer owns the infrastructure and systems that allow Neara's ML discipline to move fast, ship reliably, and scale without breaking.

Neara is conducting cutting edge research, developing multi-modal spatial frontier models. You will help the team run faster, helping overcome challenges that have never been seen before in the world. These models work with a range of less researched data types, including point cloud, geospatial data, and asset data. The lack of research maturity in the geospatial domain and novel nature of the problem presents unique challenges around performance, data unification, and deployment.

The problem and role stretch beyond pure research. These models will be deployed with our global utility and new vertical customers, delivering real value and increased climate resilience for critical infrastructure. Your role will be critical in both making sure we can develop frontier level spatial intelligence quickly and economically, but also in making sure we can deploy those models efficiently to our customers.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

• Own the ML platform strategy end-to-end - Define and drive the multi-year technical roadmap for training pipelines, serving architecture, experiment management, and monitoring systems that tie it all together.

• Build tooling that accelerates ML delivery - Develop foundational infrastructure that takes engineers from idea to production faster, standardising workflows and eliminating friction between experimentation and deployment.

• Solve hard distributed systems problems - Enable training across distributed data with residency and security requirements, while ensuring models run efficiently across varied GPU hardware, including sparse tensor implementations and architecture bottlenecks.

• Design scalable, flexible serving architecture - Define serving systems that handle spiky load in production while giving the ML team the freedom to experiment across regions, customers, tasks, and verticals.

• Unblock the ML team at scale - Identify what's slowing the team down, define the contracts and interfaces between training, evaluation, and serving, and build the roadmap to turn ambitious research into routine delivery.

WHAT YOU’LL BRING

• Significant hands-on experience building and operating training pipelines, distributed compute, model serving, and monitoring systems at scale.

• Strong proficiency writing and optimising custom CUDA kernels for deep learning training, ideally across non-text/image data types, with experience diagnosing performance bottlenecks in sparse architectures.

• Proven experience across production model monitoring, data quality frameworks, and training data warehouses brought to ML readiness.

• Demonstrated ability to set ML platform standards, influence engineering roadmaps, and drive alignment on complex infrastructure decisions across teams without direct authority.

• Proficiency in Python and PyTorch (or equivalent), strong system design instincts, and an R&D foundation that informs good prioritisation decisions.

• Experience across AWS, GCP, or Azure, container orchestration (Kubernetes, Docker), and on-prem or neocloud environments.

• A track record of leading, mentoring, and coaching ML engineers, raising the technical bar of the teams around you through hands-on guidance, documentation, and internal standards.

WHAT’S IN IT FOR YOU?

• Competitive salary

• Meaningful ESOP

• Fully Flexible Work Environment. We have a fully stocked office (and an impressive snack collection) 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

To apply, please use the online application link below. Neara values diversity, belonging and equal employment opportunities. We encourage individuals from all backgrounds to apply.

No agencies or third-party service providers, please.
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