Verification & Validation Team Lead (AU)

About the role

DroneShield is seeking a Verification & Validation Team Lead to lead, coach, and grow a small, early-career V&V team while staying deeply hands-on in the field and lab. This is a working leadership role: you’ll set the technical standard by doing the work alongside your engineers, not just directing it. Reporting to the Verification and Validation Manager, you’ll work cross-functionally with Systems Engineering, QA, T&E, NPI, and developers to ensure the reliability, performance, and compliance of complex systems.

The role blends day-to-day team leadership with system-level integration, performance benchmarking, environmental testing, and formal verification of both software and hardware. You’ll lead across the full V&V lifecycle, from test plan creation through execution and reporting, including real-world field testing, while actively raising the technical ceiling of a developing team.

Responsibilities, Duties and Expectations 

• Lead and develop a young V&V team. Provide day-to-day technical and people leadership to a team of early-career V&V engineers mainly allocating work, setting priorities, onboarding new hires, giving regular feedback, and deliberately building the team’s capability over time. Your success is measured as much by how good your team becomes as by what you personally ship.
• Coach in the field and at the bench. Actively coach engineers where the learning is real by pairing with them on live trials, walking through anomaly investigations together, and raising their technical maturity on sensor behaviour, RF, and system integration. Model the standard for rigour and field discipline rather than only describing it.
• Stay genuinely hands-on. Personally set up sensors, antennas, RF equipment, and field-ready devices; instrument systems for meaningful data capture; and run tests yourself where technical judgement is critical. Work alongside the team rather than delegating the hard or interesting problems away from them.
• Act as the technical reference point for the team. Be the go-to authority for verification methodology, sensor behaviour, integration issues, and field test design, and help the team build the judgement to make those calls themselves.
• Lead field-based verification campaigns end-to-end. Plan and run site deployments, range trials, live-environment trials, and operational evaluations by owning planning, instrumentation, execution, data capture, anomaly investigation, and reporting, and bringing the team along through each phase.
• Own the V&V strategy for complex systems. Drive verification and validation for embedded systems, integrated hardware/software platforms, and system-of-systems deployments, from planning through customer acceptance.
• Own and execute system-level test plans and procedures, ensuring full alignment with system requirements, customer specifications, and applicable compliance standards and review the team’s plans, procedures, and reports to uplift quality and consistency.
• Direct lab-based, integration, qualification, and acceptance testing, including environmental and reliability campaigns using temperature chambers, RF test benches, power measurement equipment, and diagnostic instrumentation.
• Lead sensor integration testing, end-to-end data validation, and hardware/software interoperability verification across the full system stack, grounded in how the system actually behaves under real-world conditions, not just on paper.
• Lead root-cause analysis of complex field and lab anomalies, applying first-principles engineering judgement. Reproduce issues, dissect data, and drive defects to closure with the systems, software, and hardware teams using these as teaching moments for the team.
• Maintain rigorous requirements traceability and verification evidence using tools such as Jama or DOORS, and enforce that discipline across the team so every claim is backed by data captured under controlled, repeatable conditions.
• Author and review high-quality technical documentation such as test plans, procedures, field reports, anomaly write-ups, and V&V summaries that holds up under internal review and customer scrutiny, and help the team write to that bar.
• Represent V&V at design reviews, verification reviews, pre-release gates, and customer/user acceptance activities. Make and defend release-readiness recommendations grounded in field-validated evidence.
• Continuously improve the verification function field procedures, instrumentation, test frameworks, reusable templates, and ways of working with a bias toward what makes a developing team genuinely more effective in the conditions the product operates in.
• Operate effectively in a fast-paced environment with shifting priorities, parallel programs, and compressed timelines. Re-baseline plans and reallocate team effort as program needs change, without losing technical rigour.

Qualifications, Experience and Skills 

• Bachelor’s degree in Electrical/Electronic Engineering, Mechatronics, Computer Science, or a closely related technical discipline.
• 8+ years of experience in Verification & Validation or Systems Integration & Test, with a substantial portion in hands-on, field-based test execution — not purely lab or office-based roles.
• Demonstrated experience leading, mentoring, or developing engineers ideally junior or early-career with a real track record of lifting a team’s technical capability, not just managing tasks.
• A genuine appetite for the working-leader model: comfortable splitting time between leading/coaching the team and doing hands-on technical work yourself.
• Demonstrable track record leading field test campaigns end-to-end: planning, instrumenting, executing, troubleshooting, and reporting under real-world conditions.
• Deep, hands-on subject matter expertise in at least one of: embedded systems, RF sensing, sensor fusion, or signal processing with the engineering judgement that comes from having personally diagnosed hard problems in these domains.
• Proven technical leadership in safety-critical, defence, or aerospace environments, including ownership of verification outcomes against contractual or regulatory requirements.
• Strong command of the practical realities of field work: setting up and instrumenting hardware in imperfect conditions, working with sensors, antennas, RF equipment, power systems, and field-ready devices, and getting useful data out of messy environments.
• Strong understanding of system testing methodologies, environmental and reliability testing, and end-to-end data validation.
• Working proficiency with scripting (Python, Bash) and Linux-based environments sufficient to interrogate systems, capture and analyse data, and guide engineers when needed.
• Strong command of defect tracking and test management tooling (Jira, Xray, Jama, Confluence) and the discipline to enforce traceability across a team.
• Excellent technical communication, able to brief executives, debate engineers, coach juniors, and write documentation that customers and certifiers will accept.
• Demonstrated ability to switch context rapidly across field, lab, program, and leadership demands without losing technical rigour.
• Willingness and enthusiasm to travel domestically and internationally for field campaigns, with availability for out-of-hours work during critical trials.

Note for recruitment agencies: We do not accept unsolicited candidates from external recruiters unless specifically instructed.