Lead Software Engineer | Engineering Manager - BlastIQ
Job Description
About the role
We are hiring a technical leader for BlastIQ, the software suite that plans, controls and reconciles drill and blast operations on mine sites worldwide. BlastIQ sits inside Orica Digital Solutions — a $300m+ global business digitising the mining workflow — and is the product that connects information back to the blast itself, where most of the value in a mine is created or lost. The work you do here moves the needle on a measurable part of the mining value chain.
The scale is real. Mines run 24/7, and every year BlastIQ helps plan and execute roughly 38,000 blasts, 9 million holes, and 2.2 million tonnes of explosives across the globe.
This is a hands-on technical role with people leadership responsibilities. We are looking for someone who loves solving complex problems with simple solutions.
There are two possible shapes for this role:
- Engineering Manager — for candidates with both deep technical capability and prior experience leading engineers, including managing leads or other managers.
- Lead Engineer — for candidates with the technical capability who are not yet ready for the full scope of the EM role.
The role reports to the Head of Engineering. As Engineering Manager, you would have five direct reports (three individual contributors and two team leads), with twelve engineers in the wider group. As Lead Engineer, you would have three direct reports; the two existing team leads would continue reporting to the Head of Engineering.
Technical depth is the most important quality we are looking for. The system is large, event-sourced, and spans cloud and field device tiers, and we need a leader who can engage with it deeply — read the code, shape the architecture, and write production code alongside the team. If you are a strong engineer who has not yet managed people but is ready to grow into that responsibility, we would like to hear from you.
The team is a mixture of remote and hybrid (Newcastle based). You will work with engineers, product managers, UX designers and mining subject matter experts distributed across Australia and overseas.