Data Engineer

Work with cutting edge AI technology, making the world a safer and more secure place. DroneShield (ASX:DRO) offers an opportunity to solve some of world’s most challenging technical problems in the rapidly growing counterdrone sector. Our customers are militaries, government agencies, airports, critical infrastructure, law enforcement and many others.

With one of the largest listed defence company market capitalisations in Australia, part of the ASX200 index, and having raised approximately $250m in 2024 alone, DroneShield is undergoing hypergrowth stage, fuelled by rapidly increasing use of drones for nefarious applications, from battlefield, to terrorism, to contraband delivery and commercial espionage.

This role is in the DroneShield Sydney headquarters in Sydney CBD. There are approximately 380 staff based in the 4,000sqm facility today, scheduled to grow to approximately 500 staff by end of 2026. Overseas on the ground presence includes Virginia (USA), Netherlands, Denmark, Mexico and Dubai, as well as distributors in over 70 countries globally.

About the role

DroneShield is seeking a Data Engineer (VisionAI) to join our development team in Sydney. In this role, you will be at the forefront of advancing our computer vision capabilities - managing large-scale image and video datasets, and building the data infrastructure and MLOps pipelines that power next-generation AI systems.

You’ll collaborate closely with engineers, data scientists, and product teams to ensure our datasets are reliable, scalable, and optimised for real-world defence and security applications. This position offers the opportunity to work on unique, mission-critical challenges where your contributions directly impact global security outcomes.

Responsibilities, Duties and Expectations

- Design, build, and optimise robust data pipelines and databases to support end-to-end computer vision workflows — from ingestion and transformation to storage and retrieval.
- Develop scalable data infrastructure and visualisation tools that ensure dataset quality and deliver actionable operational insights.
- Work cross-functionally with data scientists, ML engineers, and software teams to enable rapid experimentation and deployment of AI-driven solutions.
- Champion best practices in data quality, governance, and reproducibility, ensuring datasets meet the standards required for mission-critical defence technology.
- Continuously innovate, identifying opportunities to automate processes, integrate new tools, and enhance MLOps efficiency.

Qualifications, Experience and Skills

- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or equivalent practical experience
- More than 3 years’ experience in data engineering, including working with unstructured data such as images or videos
- Proficiency in Python development, including computer vision libraries (e.g. OpenCV, Pillow, scikit-image)
- Experience designing, maintaining, querying and optimising relational databases (e.g. PostgreSQL, MySQL)
- Experience building and managing scalable ETL/ELT and/or MLOps pipelines (e.g. Apache Airflow, ClearML)
- Experience in exploratory data analysis (EDA) and building dashboards (e.g. FiftyOne, Pandas, Tableau, Power BI)
- Familiar with cloud platforms (e.g. AWS, GCP), version control system (Git), data versioning tools (e.g. DVC), and on-premises data management
- Knowledge of computer vision model evaluation and synthetic data generation techniques is favourable
- Exposure to Vision Language Models or generative AI for data preprocessing is favourable
- Previous ‘start-up’ or ‘scale-up’ experience is favourable
- Strong problem-solving skills, attention to data quality, and effective cross-team communication
- An abundance of ambition and motivation to grow the company and compete with the big players in the industry

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

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