Tech Lead Manager - Experience 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.

We're looking for an experienced Tech Lead Manager to lead Neara's Experience Platform, taking technical ownership for our platform’s usability, performance and visual appeal across desktop and mobile devices.

In our Experience platform teams, we are looking for leaders with the technical depth to build robust features and capabilities that serve both internal & external customers. You have experience in creating user experiences and components that enable complex workflows that are visually appealing and work at scale.

This is a people-first leadership position with strong technical depth in software engineering. You'll split your time leading the team and driving delivery, whilst remaining hands-on to guide system design and tackle complex technical challenges.

At the core of all of our teams is a customer centricity where we are fanatical about delivering tangible customer value rapidly and safely. Through great user experiences, you will unlock the ability for our customers to gain critical insights and make decisions for their networks.

WHAT YOU’LL DO

Team Leadership & Delivery

• Lead and grow a high-performing engineering team, supporting both technical development and career progression.

• Own delivery for your team's domain: Setting clear goals, defining milestones, and ensuring projects ship reliably and sustainably.

• Own workflows and development practices that balance speed, quality, and long-term maintainability.

• Create clarity in ambiguous problem spaces, helping teams break down complex technical challenges into achievable plans.

• Foster strong collaboration with Product, Design, Customer Success and Sales teams to ensure alignment and effective execution.

• Partner closely with other Tech Lead Managers to raise the bar across engineering: influence best practices, tooling, and long-term platform direction, and help scale Neara's engineering culture as we grow.

Technical Leadership (Hands on)

As a technical leader for an engineering group, your job is to build and lead the engineers behind a complex product. In the Experience Platform team, you will be hands-on with parts of the stack that use Dart, JavaScript, Flutter, Rust and WebGL for rendering & interacting with large-scale 3D models and rich dashboards in the browser.

How you will best contribute technically

• 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.

• Shape the client and product UX and product UX end to end: the UI and design system, rendering and interaction performance, and the 3D visualisation of very large networks.

• Build the capabilities other engineering teams build on top of — APIs, extension points and shared components — as well as the features our end users touch directly.

SKILLS

• Care factor for end user app experience - UI, design systems, performance and 3D rendering. You notice the details that make an application feel considered, and you hold your team to that bar. You possess the taste for interaction design where the goal is a fluent workflow rather than just simple interfaces, and the judgement to respect expert users who live in the product all day.

• Scaling a user experience to millions of objects - aggregation, loading and unloading concerns, and the visualisation techniques that keep an interface responsive at that volume.

• Enabling other engineering teams as well as the end user - an ability to get to know your customer, internal or external, and elicit good requirements that solve their problem as well as improve the platform.

• Harmonising user experiences across many use cases - bringing coherence to a product used by many different roles for many different jobs, rather than letting each use case grow its own dialect.

• Product engineering for expert tooling - You have a strong track record building or leading on dense, stateful, expert-user tools (e.g., CAD, design tools like Figma, GIS, IDEs, or serious data viz) rather than standard SaaS dashboards.

WHO YOU ARE

• A technical people-leader who's owned delivery end to end: comfortable operating across engineering and product, accountable for outcomes not just outputs, and experience 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 of 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 haves

• Experience owning a design system, component library or platform SDK that other teams depended on.

• Experience with graphics, WebGL/GPU work, or rendering large 3D scenes in a browser or desktop client.

• A consumer product background, which is valuable for the customer empathy it builds.

• Exposure to geospatial systems, utilities, energy, simulation, or physics-based platforms; and strong mathematical reasoning or a mechanical, civil, or electrical engineering background. Extra bonus points if you have been building software that models the real world we live in.

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.

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.

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.

No agencies or third-party service providers, please.

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