Engineering Manager, Data Processing
About Emesent
Emesent is a Brisbane-based world leader in autonomous LiDAR mapping and drone autonomy. Our technology captures the inaccessible: underground mines, GPS-denied environments, and complex-built spaces, serving customers across Mining, Defence and AEC surveying. We are scaling fast, with a newly launched product line and major opportunities in the pipeline.
The role
You will lead our Data Processing engineering group end to end: delivery, quality, support, technical direction and people. You are self-sufficient in execution across the disciplines your group needs, while staying deeply engaged with the rest of the business. You own outcomes, not just output. The role reports to the Director of Engineering. We are deliberately investing in engineering management as a discipline at Emesent, and we are hiring someone whose experience helps lift the whole management group, not only their own team.
The team
This team is home to our genuinely world-leading SLAM capability. Every scan a customer captures becomes a map through this team’s pipeline: highly detailed, highly accurate, and reliable enough that customers stake their deliverables on it. The same capability powers our unique autonomy, letting Hovermap fly and map where GPS cannot reach.
The scope runs from applied research to production software:
- The SLAM engine and processing workflows behind Hovermap and GX1: processing, merging, colourisation, georeferencing (RTK, PPK and GCP) and calibration.
- Libraries supporting real-time operations, including visualisation and autonomous flight.
- The processing backbone for Aura, our desktop processing application, and Aura Cloud, where cloud based processing is being built now.
- Production enablement: scanner calibration and automated accuracy checks that let manufacturing scale to demand.
The team is modernising its codebase and tooling while shipping improvements that lift our products. It is a
team of specialists doing work few teams anywhere get to do; your job is to point that capability at the biggest outcomes.
Responsibilities
Customer, product and business impact
- Represent the voice of the user: partner with Product to discover the biggest challenges our users have and to estimate effort, timelines and trade-offs; keep assumptions explicit and revisable.
- Own the business impact of your group’s work, not only its technical quality. Understand how your roadmap connects to revenue, customer commitments and company strategy.
Technical leadership and architecture
- Lead the group toward its target architecture, working with senior and staff engineers. This group owns core, high-value technology that other teams build on, so success looks like a clean architecture with well-structured interfaces and a strong reliability suite. We are working toward this state, and you will drive that journey.
- Drive technical sustainability in practical terms: reduce bus factor, manage cognitive load, keep systems understandable and maintainable. High craft in service of outcomes, not gold-plating.
Delivery and predictability
- Make commitments the wider business can plan around. Commercial and manufacturing commit to customers on the back of your dates; treat that as the standard.
- Run group planning with your PM: sprint planning, review and retro, clear sprint goals, WIP under control, and a predictable cadence with commitments visible.
- Own delivery hygiene: track progress, unblock early, and escalate risks with options, not surprises.
- Allocate people across sub-domains; balance feature work, support and tech debt.
Quality and reliability
- Own quality within engineering: ship work that QA verifies rather than debugs.
- Ensure automated testing and release gates are meaningful and improving over time, not checkbox theatre.
- Build a habit of continuous improvement: keep a steady flow of structural improvements shipping (automation, tooling, simplification, dependency upgrades) that increase throughput, reliability and security.
Support and issue resolution
- Ensure support is covered and predictable: rosters, escalation paths, clear ownership.
- Own third-tier ticket triage for the group: root causes identified, fixes prioritised appropriately, learnings fed back into reliability and quality.
- Lead incident management for the group when needed: fast triage, post-incident actions that stick, and clear communication with internal stakeholders (and occasionally customers, via the right channels) on high-impact issues and resolution status.
Team leadership and performance
- Create a safe, supportive, high-ownership team environment. Celebrate wins in ways that reinforce good delivery and engineering.
- Develop your people deliberately: regular feedback and coaching, performance reviews and development goals aligned to company needs and individual growth, and hiring ahead of need with a high bar.
- Act on under-contribution, poor fit and conflict early and directly. Have the hard conversations.
Raising the management bar
- Bring your experience to the EM group: share what has worked for you in planning, performance management, stakeholder communication and incident practice, and learn from what already works here.
- Help turn good practice into shared practice: contribute to playbooks and rituals the whole management group builds and improves together.
- Lead by example: run your team in a way other EMs can learn from, and stay open to learning from them.
How you work with others
Product: partner on discovery and domain knowledge. Keep customer and business impacts front of mind in technical decisions; keep priorities and trade-offs explicit.
QA: involve early on risk and release gating. QA is a partner, not a last-minute gate.
Principal Architect: consult on cross-group architecture and interface or contract changes.
Peer EMs: treat the management group as a team you belong to, not just a set of counterparts. Help lift it.
Commercial and Manufacturing: give commitments they can plan around and manage expectations actively, with early warning when things change.
What you bring
- Experience managing senior, specialist engineers in an algorithm-heavy domain such as robotics, geospatial, computer vision or perception, with the credibility to engage their technical decisions without needing to be the deepest expert in the room.
- A track record of taking algorithmic or systems-heavy work from research or prototype to reliable production software and knowing what changes between those two worlds.
- Strong software architecture experience: you have led teams toward a target architecture, with clean, well-structured interfaces for systems other teams build on, backed by a strong reliability suite.
- Ideally, cloud architecture experience, as more of the group’s processing expands to SaaS workflows.
- Delivery leadership others can plan around: commitments made and met, risks surfaced early, stakeholders who trust your dates.
- Deliberate people development: feedback, coaching, hiring, and the hard conversations when needed.
What good looks like at twelve months
- The group is measurably closer to its target architecture: cleaner interfaces and a stronger reliability suite.
- At least one core SLAM improvement has shipped.
- Your bench is stronger than when you arrived.
- Your group’s delivery is predictable enough that commercial and manufacturing plan against it without padding.
- At least one practice you introduced is now standard across the engineering management group.
The Perks
- 9-day fortnight — every second Friday off.
- Employee Share Option Plan (ESOP) — share in Emesent's success.
- Genuine learning and development opportunities, including LinkedIn Learning.
- Flexible working arrangements and a casual dress code.
- Employee Assistance Program and Qoctor online telehealth.
- A full day of leave each year for your work anniversary.
