Data Platform Engineering Team Lead

Work with cutting edge technology, making the world a safer and more secure place. DroneShield (ASX:DRO) offers an opportunity to solve some of the world's most challenging technical problems in Electronic Warfare, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, RF sensing, Sensor Fusion and distributed systems. Working with high profile customers across militaries, government agencies, airports, critical infrastructure, law enforcement and many others.

With one of the largest listed defence company market capitalisations in Australia 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 350 staff based in the 4,000sqm facility today, scheduled to grow to approximately 400 staff by end of 2025. Overseas on the ground presence includes USA, Denmark, Mexico, and UAE, as well as distributors in over 70 countries globally.

About the role

You'll build and lead a team responsible for a significant uplift of our tools and infrastructure for data capture, ingest, storage, annotation, and service. This will mean a combination of in-house tool development and integration with off-the-shelf solutions.

The position will report to the Engineering Manager, Algorithms, in the Sensors & Effectors group.

Responsibilities, Duties and Expectations

• Build and lead a team of Data and Software Engineers to develop tooling for data capture, ingest, storage, annotation, and service
• Anticipate and respond to the needs of your customers, and drive solutions until they are successful
• Develop technical and execution strategy to ensure that tools are built in a robust and scalable way within a cohesive end-to-end data tooling architecture
• Ensure software stacks are well instrumented and routinely tested to enable continual assessment and improvement against key metrics
• Create and deliver comprehensive training materials and workshops to teams across the business
• Spot opportunities where off-the-shelf products exist to solve our problems
• Collaborate with other teams to drive procurement and allocation of storage and compute resources
• Automate away the operational tasks of your and other teams to help the business scale

Qualifications, Experience and Skills

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Mathematics or similar technical field of study, or equivalent practical experience
• Experience leading a team of Engineers (3+ years)
• Experience with Python, and one or more compiled languages (Go or C++ preferred)
• Experience with large scale data operations and associated infrastructure/platforms (e.g. Kubernetes, Snowflake, Spark, Databricks)
• Experience with AI/ML based systems (5+ years)
• Ability to translate business requirements and objectives between the engineering and executive team
• Ability to work in a multidisciplinary team, communicating effectively with engineers from non-software / data science backgrounds
• Track record for delivering commercial solutions through the entire life cycle
• Electronic Warfare (EW) experience is highly valued

Who you are

• You thrive leading teams of people
• You enjoy mentoring others to adopt industry standard practices
• You are a lifelong learner who keeps up with current best practices in your areas of expertise
• You have an abundance of ambition and motivation to grow the business
• You want to beat the big players in the industry

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