Lead Engineer, Engineering Productivity

Imagine preventing wildfires before they start, or ensuring power grids stay resilient during extreme weather. That’s the real-world impact we create every day at Neara.

We build 3D physics-enabled digital twins of critical infrastructure networks that help utilities and infrastructure companies run scenarios, assess risks, and make smarter decisions that affect millions of lives.

We’re not just another tech company - we’re TIME’s 2024 Most Influential Company making tangible differences in communities worldwide. We're backed by some of the world’s leading venture capital investors.

Our team is passionate, brilliant, and genuinely excited about solving problems that matter. We’ve built something special here: a culture where everyone owns our mission, innovation thrives, and great work gets recognised. And now we’re ready for our next chapter of growth.

Some of the world’s largest utilities depend on Neara to answer their most pressing investment, disaster management, and strategic questions across risk, safety, resiliency, and more. Our software stands apart by uniquely mixing engineering-grade detail with network-wide scale. Our ambition is to redefine the future of critical infrastructure intelligence. We need smart, creative, driven people to help us achieve it.

As a Lead Engineer for Engineering Productivity, your customers are our Software and Machine Learning engineers. You will focus on the speed, 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 a 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.

• 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.