Lead Firmware Engineer

Sydney | $150,000-$170,000 + super

We’re working with an established Australian engineering business that designs high-end products for creative industries doing big things for the arts.

Its products combine embedded control, colour science, networking and rugged electronics. They’re designed in Sydney, manufactured at scale and used by professional crews across international markets.

The team is now hiring a Lead Firmware Engineer to take ownership of the architecture behind its next generation of products.

The role

You’ll become the central technical owner of an established embedded software platform.

There is a mature codebase and an experienced multidisciplinary team around you. Your job is to give the firmware clear architectural direction while remaining close enough to the code and hardware to deliver.

You’ll:

• Own the firmware architecture and technical roadmap across a family of connected products

• Develop embedded software in C/C++ on STM32 microcontrollers using FreeRTOS

• Make sound decisions around task structure, inter-task communication, semaphores, mutexes and system behaviour

• Build and maintain bootloaders, firmware update mechanisms and networked device functionality

• Work across Ethernet, TCP/IP, LWIP, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, USB and wired control protocols

• Develop embedded web interfaces and on-device control experiences

• Work with colour-control algorithms, high-resolution dimming, special effects and camera synchronisation

• Debug the boundary between firmware and electronics using UART, I2C, SPI, logic analysers and oscilloscopes

• Read schematics, understand PCB designs and work closely with electronics and mechanical engineers

• Improve the structure, reliability and maintainability of an established embedded platform

• Help shape future work in remote device management, fleet visibility and connected asset tracking

This is a hands-on senior engineering role with genuine architectural authority and a pathway towards technical leadership.

What you’ll bring

Firmware is your core craft. You understand electronics, but your depth sits in building and owning embedded software systems.

You’ll likely have:

• Eight or more years of embedded software or firmware engineering experience

• Strong commercial C/C++ development experience

• Deep experience with STM32 or comparable 32-bit ARM microcontrollers

• Production experience with FreeRTOS or another real-time operating system

• A strong understanding of embedded networking and communications

• Practical bootloader and firmware update experience

• Evidence of owning substantial systems or codebases, rather than isolated components

• The ability to explain architectural decisions clearly and test your thinking with other engineers

• Enough hardware fluency to investigate problems across the firmware-electronics boundary

Experience with embedded GUIs, web servers, AWS or Azure IoT, Python, C#, cellular connectivity, GPS or mobile applications would be useful. None of those outweighs strong firmware judgement.

How you’ll work

This is a small, practical engineering environment. People are expected to understand the wider product, ask why something is being built and spot the next problem without waiting for a detailed instruction.

You’ll suit the team if you’re:

• Curious about the complete system, not only your assigned component

• Comfortable taking ownership in an environment with fewer layers and less ceremony

• Decisive without becoming dogmatic

• Happy to challenge an approach, explain your reasoning and listen when someone has a better one

• Motivated by building a physical product whose performance is visible in the final result

The role is based primarily onsite in Sydney, where the products, electronics and test equipment live. There is sensible flexibility to work from home when focused work calls for it, along with onsite parking.

The interview process

The technical assessment reflects the actual work. There are no algorithm puzzles or performative coding exercises.

Expect practical conversations covering:

• FreeRTOS task communication and code structure

• System architecture through a whiteboard design exercise

• Hardware interfaces, schematics and firmware-electronics troubleshooting

The team wants to understand how you think, what you’ve genuinely owned and how you’ll work alongside the engineers already there.

Interested?

Apply through this advertisement or contact Toby Tank at The Onset for a confidential conversation.

We’ll share the company’s identity and full product context directly with suitably aligned candidates. All applications and enquiries will be managed exclusively through The Onset.

Group Product Manager – AI & Intelligence Platforms

Sydney | Hybrid – 3 days in office

• Own an enterprise AI portfolio spanning NLP, agents, APIs and data enrichment
• Build explainable and auditable AI for complex, high-scrutiny environments
• Lead Product strategy, commercialisation and a team of Product Managers

The Opportunity

We’re partnering with an established Australian technology company whose software helps global enterprises, government agencies, investigators and legal teams find intelligence within enormous volumes of complex data. The business is making a significant investment in the next generation of its platform, with AI at the centre of that strategy.

This isn’t a role focused on adding a chatbot or superficial GenAI features. You will define how AI, machine learning and agentic technology become core capabilities within an enterprise data platform. Because customers may need to defend AI-generated findings before regulators, courts or investigative bodies, every outcome must be explainable, auditable and traceable to its source.

The Role

Reporting to the General Manager of Product, you will own the vision and strategy for an AI portfolio spanning:

• NLP and data enrichment
• Entity extraction, classification and semantic search
• AI agents and agentic workflows
• RAG and LLM orchestration
• MCP integrations
• APIs, developer tools and partner integrations

You will lead and coach a team of Product Managers while remaining close to the work—engaging customers, testing hypotheses, prototyping with AI tools and evaluating model performance.

Working across Product, Data Science, Engineering, Architecture and Commercial teams, you will determine what the organisation should build, integrate, partner on or expose through its platform.

What You’ll Own

• Set the AI portfolio vision, strategy and roadmap
• Identify the customer problems where AI can create genuine value
• Lead Product strategy across AI, NLP, agents, APIs and developer capabilities
• Establish measures for accuracy, precision, recall and explainability
• Shape model strategy with Data Science and Engineering
• Build and develop a team of Product Managers
• Define priority use cases, go-to-market plans, pricing and packaging
• Grow the partner, developer and technology ecosystem
• Drive adoption, expansion and commercial outcomes

What We’re Looking For

You are an experienced Product leader who combines AI credibility with strong commercial and platform thinking.

• Experience in enterprise search, analytics, cybersecurity, legal technology, investigations, regulated software or other high-scrutiny environments would be highly valuable.
• Exposure to MCP, agent frameworks, LLM orchestration, graph technologies or AI governance would also be well regarded.

You will ideally bring:

• Senior Product experience at GPM, Product Lead, Principal PM or Head of Product level
• Experience shipping AI or machine-learning products into production
• Experience with complex enterprise software, platforms or data products
• Strong API, integration or developer-product experience
• Knowledge of NLP, semantic search, RAG, agents or data enrichment
• Experience leading and developing Product Managers
• Strong commercial judgment across use cases, packaging and monetisation
• The ability to influence technical leaders and senior executives

Why Join?

This is an opportunity to lead AI with genuine technical and commercial depth—turning complex data into trusted intelligence that customers, partners and AI agents can safely use. You will shape an important enterprise AI portfolio, build a Product team and influence everything from model and platform strategy through to commercialisation.

This is a Sydney-based hybrid role requiring three days per week in the office.

For more information please contact jacquie@theonset.com.au

Group Product Manager – Data Platform

Sydney | Hybrid | Senior Product Leadership

We’re partnering with an established Australian enterprise software business to appoint a Group Product Manager – Data Platform.

The business is an established enterprise software company operating globally, with technology used by large enterprises and government organisations to process, investigate and make sense of large volumes of complex data.

The organisation is investing heavily in Product leadership and the evolution of its core platform, making this a high-impact role with significant influence over future Product direction.

This is a senior Product leadership role owning strategy and direction across a complex, large-scale Data Platform that sits at the core of multiple enterprise products and workflows.

You’ll lead Product across capabilities spanning:

• Data ingestion from multiple sources and systems
• High-volume data processing
• Transformation, enrichment and classification
• Workflow orchestration
• Platform services and reusable capabilities
• APIs and integrations
• Scalability, reliability and performance
• Data access, search, review and visualisation
• Platform modernisation and migration

The Role

You’ll own the Product strategy and roadmap for a significant part of the organisation’s core platform, working closely with Engineering, Architecture, Commercial and senior leadership.

The role requires someone who can operate at both a strategic and hands-on level — setting direction across multiple Product streams, leading Product Managers, shaping investment decisions and getting close enough to the technology to make strong platform decisions.

A major part of the role will be evolving an established platform environment, including decisions around:

• What to modernise
• What to consolidate
• What to retire
• What should become reusable platform capability
• Where to invest for future scale
• How to balance technical debt with customer and commercial priorities

What We’re Looking For

• Senior Product leadership experience across complex Data Platforms or enterprise SaaS
• Strong understanding of data ingestion, processing, orchestration and platform capabilities
• Experience leading large-scale platform modernisation and transformation
• Technically credible, with the ability to work closely with Engineering and Architecture
• Strong Product leadership and commercial thinking, with experience leading and developing Product Managers
• Experience operating in high-volume, highly scalable data or platform environments
• Strong understanding of APIs, integrations and reusable platform services
• Ability to influence across Product, Engineering, Architecture and senior stakeholders
• Proven ability to connect technical platform investment to customer and commercial outcomes
  
  

If this sounds interesting and you’d like to learn more please contact Jacquie@theonset.com.au for more details

Product Manager – Marketplace (Seller Success)

6-month contract | Major Australian retail marketplace | Melbourne based

• Lead the Seller enablement Squad for the Marketplace team
• Own prioritisation, platform strategy and investment trade-offs across multiple businesses and stakeholders

The Opportunity

Work with a major Australian retailer to appoint a Product Manager within its growing Marketplace team.

This role will own the Seller Success and Seller Experience roadmap, helping make it faster and easier for merchants to join, integrate with and grow on the marketplace.

You will inherit a clear roadmap and work closely with Product, Engineering, Design and commercial stakeholders to refine priorities and deliver meaningful improvements for sellers.

This is a hands-on Product role for someone who can quickly understand an established platform, build strong stakeholder relationships and turn known opportunities into well-defined, valuable outcomes.

What You’ll Own

• The day-to-day Product roadmap for Seller Success and Seller Experience.
• Improvements across seller acquisition, onboarding, activation and ongoing performance.
• The Seller Portal and merchant self-service capabilities.
• Seller support tools, workflows and experience improvements.
• Initiatives that reduce onboarding time and help sellers begin trading sooner.
• Product requirements for seller integrations, APIs and connected platform capabilities.
• Prioritisation and delivery across Product, Engineering, Design, Operations and commercial teams.
• Measurement of seller outcomes, including onboarding speed, activation, adoption and seller performance.

What You’ll Be Working On

The marketplace is focused on attracting more high-quality sellers, getting them successfully onboarded and helping them perform once they are live.

You may work on opportunities such as:

• Simplifying merchant onboarding and reducing the time it takes a seller to go live.
• Improving seller registration, verification, catalogue setup and activation journeys.
• Strengthening the Seller Portal and merchant self-service experience.
• Making seller integrations and APIs easier to implement and support.
• Improving the tools and workflows used to manage seller performance.
• Helping sellers understand how to improve their range, availability and sales.
• Identifying friction across the end-to-end seller journey and prioritising the highest-value improvements.

What We’re Looking For

You will be an experienced Product Manager who is comfortable joining an established team, inheriting an existing roadmap and creating momentum quickly.

Ideally, you will bring:

• Product Management experience within a marketplace, eCommerce, retail, SaaS or platform environment.
• Experience owning merchant, seller, supplier or B2B customer journeys.
• Strong knowledge of onboarding, activation, self-service and customer experience.
• The ability to work with Engineering teams on APIs, integrations and technically complex platform capabilities.
• Strong discovery, prioritisation, roadmap management and delivery skills.
• Confidence working with senior stakeholders across commercial, operational and technology teams.
• A practical, outcomes-focused approach and the ability to operate effectively within an existing strategy.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to bring clarity across multiple teams and competing priorities.

Experience in marketplace seller tooling, merchant portals, catalogue management, payments, fulfilment or seller performance would be highly regarded.

What Success Looks Like

You will help the team deliver an established roadmap while continuously refining it through seller insight, data and stakeholder input.

Success will mean reducing friction for merchants, accelerating seller onboarding and activation, improving the seller experience and enabling more sellers to perform successfully on the platform.

Why Join?

• Own a meaningful Seller Success roadmap within a large-scale marketplace.
• Work on complex Product challenges across seller experience, integrations and platform capabilities.
• Join an experienced, collaborative Product team with a clear roadmap and strong business support.
• Make a measurable impact on how quickly sellers can join, activate and grow.

If you are a hands-on Product Manager with marketplace, merchant or platform experience, we would love to hear from you.

For more information please contact jacquie@theonset.com.au 

Senior Platform Engineer | PropertyIQ 

You probably don’t need another Platform Engineering job.

If you’re already running AWS at scale, building Terraform modules and getting pulled into the difficult production incidents, moving somewhere else to do more of the same is not much of a reason to leave.

This role is different because there is still meaningful platform engineering left to do.

PropertyIQ sits inside Macquarie, but operates as a dedicated product engineering environment. You get the scale, investment and engineering standards of a global financial group, without disappearing into a huge infrastructure function where every decision has already been made.

What you’ll actually own

You’ll help shape the engineering foundations that product teams build on.

That includes:

• Multi-region AWS across Lambda, Aurora RDS, VPC, ALB, Route53, IAM and KMS

• Reusable Terraform/Terragrunt modules used across customer environments

• Reliability engineering against a 99.98% SLO

• Observability, incident response and production health

• Secure cloud networking, including Transit Gateway and Network Firewall

• CI/CD across GitHub Actions and Bitbucket Pipelines

• Puppet, Hiera and configuration management at scale

The expectation is not that you simply operate what already exists.

You’ll lead ambiguous infrastructure problems, improve the standards other teams build against and help decide what the next version of the platform should look like.

This is platform engineering, not ticket ops

The goal is to make developers faster without making production less safe.

That means building repeatable infrastructure, better deployment paths, stronger guardrails and tooling that removes manual work rather than creating another queue for engineers to wait in.

When something foundational needs to change, you’ll be one of the people deciding how it should work.

There’s also room to push into AI-assisted engineering

The team is already exploring Claude, GitHub Copilot and agent-based workflows for platform and DevOps engineering.

That includes custom instructions, tool-calling schemas and autonomous tooling, rather than simply handing engineers another chat interface.

Who this suits

You’re likely already a Senior Platform, DevOps, Cloud or SRE Engineer.

You know AWS deeply, have built reusable infrastructure rather than just consumed it, and can move comfortably across Linux, networking, CI/CD, security, Python or Bash and production troubleshooting.

You’re also the sort of engineer people involve when a problem crosses multiple systems and there isn’t an obvious answer.

Why consider leaving a good job?

Because mature platform roles can eventually become maintenance jobs.

The architecture is decided. The hard problems have been solved. Your job becomes keeping everything moving.

PropertyIQ still has important platform decisions left to make.

You’ll get enough scale and complexity to make the engineering interesting, while still having enough influence to change how the platform is built.

If you’re curious, reach out to julien at theonset dot com dot au or call me on zero 4 zero 6 one 5 8 8 three 2

We are working with a high-growth Australian AI software business looking for an Account Executive to join its Sydney team!

This isn’t a traditional AE role where the pipeline and playbook are already built.

You’ll work directly with the founders, own the full sales cycle and help shape how the business wins sophisticated customers across infrastructure, construction and government.

We’re looking for someone who:

• Has personally won new business in B2B SaaS or enterprise technology
• Can create pipeline and manage complex, multi-stakeholder sales cycles
• Is credible with senior, operational and technical stakeholders
• Wants broader ownership without stepping away from the actual selling
• Is interested in how AI can improve the delivery of major projects

Experience in construction technology, infrastructure software, property technology or government SaaS would be valuable, but it isn’t essential.

This is a strong opportunity for an Enterprise AE or BDM who has proven they can sell and is ready to help build something.

Sydney-based.

Interested? Apply now or feel free to email Megan - megan@theonset.com.au

Senior AI Engineer | AI Transformation, Automation & Governance

We're working with an established Australian technology company that is serious about becoming genuinely AI-native, rethinking how the organisation operates, how decisions are made and where AI can create meaningful commercial leverage.

They're looking for a Senior AI Engineer who sits at the intersection of engineering, business operations and AI strategy. You'll work directly with senior leadership and teams across the business to find the friction, challenge how things are done, and build the systems and automations that make the company smarter and faster.

Find the problems worth solving

• Work across the business to uncover inefficient workflows, manual processes and information gaps.

• Challenge and redesign processes before automating them.

• Prioritise opportunities based on ROI, risk and genuine commercial impact.

Build & automate

• Build production-grade internal AI systems using LLMs, RAG, agentic workflows, APIs and automation.

• Connect fragmented systems and information to create trusted knowledge, insights and better decision-making.

• Take ideas from discovery through prototype, production and measurable adoption.

Own AI governance

• Establish the guardrails for how AI is safely and responsibly used across the organisation.

• Build AI-enabled approaches to security, compliance and governance, including ISO, SOC 2 and HIPAA.

• Own evaluation, auditability, privacy and appropriate human oversight of AI systems.

Influence the business

• Work directly with the CTO, Chief of Staff and executive team to shape the company's AI roadmap.

• Consult, communicate and influence across technical and non-technical teams.

• Lift AI capability across the business and help teams understand where AI adds value — and where it doesn't.

What we're looking for

You need to be technically excellent — but technical capability alone won't get you this job.

• Strong software/full-stack engineering foundations with experience building real AI systems in production.

• Hands-on experience with LLMs, RAG, agentic systems, integrations, evaluation and automation.

• Strong consulting and stakeholder discovery skills — you can uncover the real problem rather than simply build what someone asks for.

• Genuine commercial acumen. You think about ROI, operating leverage, risk and business outcomes.

• Strong understanding of AI governance, security, privacy and responsible deployment.

• High autonomy and ownership — comfortable working from ambiguity rather than waiting for a perfect specification.

Experience in healthcare, regulated SaaS, consulting, solutions engineering or business transformation would be highly regarded.

Why this role?

This is a rare opportunity to combine AI engineering, internal consulting, business transformation and governance.

You'll have access to senior leadership, autonomy to identify the problems worth solving and the mandate to help shape how an entire organisation adopts AI.

Success won't be measured by how many agents you build.

It'll be measured by hours saved, errors removed, decisions accelerated and commercial value created.

Full-time | Australia | Remote-first

Ready to build the finance engine behind a high-growth global scale-up?

I’m hiring for a Financial Controller to join a fast growing technology business entering its next stage of international expansion.

This is a hands on role for someone who wants to be close to the business, not just reporting on the numbers but helping shape how finance operates as the company grows.

You’ll likely work across:

• Own month end, reporting and financial control, keeping the numbers accurate and the business well informed
• Keep a close eye on cash flow and improve financial visibility across the business
• Stay ahead of tax, compliance and reporting requirements as the company continues to scale
• Build smarter finance systems, stronger processes and better internal controls for the next stage of growth
• Give the leadership team clear commercial and financial insights to support better decision making
• Build the finance foundations needed to support international growth across new markets

We’re particularly interested in people who have worked in a startup, scale-up or high-growth technology environment and are comfortable balancing hands-on delivery with broader commercial thinking.

A CA/CPA background would be highly regarded, but just as important is someone pragmatic, adaptable and comfortable operating in a fast-moving environment.

If you’re a Financial Controller, Finance Manager or operational finance professional looking to step into a broader role, I’d love to hear from you.

Interested? Apply now or feel free to email Megan - megan@theonset.com.au

Global Paid Media and Growth Lead

• Set, own and deliver the paid growth strategy
• Lead a multi-million dollar paid media function
• Circa $190k - $210k plus super and bonus

Join a global, high-growth digital platform operating at the forefront of the creative, content and AI ecosystem.

This is a pivotal role leading a multi-million dollar global paid media function, with a clear mandate to scale customer acquisition through sophisticated, full-funnel campaigns across social and non-search channels.

You’ll have end-to-end ownership of paid growth strategy and execution, working closely with in-house creative and analytics teams to build a high-velocity experimentation engine that drives measurable performance.

With direct access to senior leadership and the CEO, this role offers both influence and accountability in shaping the future of the growth function.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Own and execute the global paid media strategy across social and non-search channels

• Manage and optimise significant media budgets to drive strong ROAS and acquisition efficiency

• Build and scale a creative experimentation framework to continuously improve performance

• Leverage AI, automation and advanced tooling to enhance campaign optimisation and testing velocity

• Partner with analytics to define attribution models, measurement frameworks and experiment design

• Identify and unlock new growth opportunities across emerging platforms and channels

• Collaborate cross-functionally with creative, product marketing and growth teams

• Lead and mentor a small team

What You Bring

• Expertise in paid media with proven success managing large-scale acquisition campaigns across multiple geographies

• Deep expertise across platforms including Meta, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest and programmatic display

• Strong track record building and scaling experimentation frameworks

• Experience leveraging AI and automation to improve campaign performance

• Advanced analytical capability with a commercial, results-driven mindset

• Leadership experience within high-performance marketing environments

• Strong cross-functional collaboration skills

Why This Role Stands Out

• Fully remote (across Australia or New Zealand)

• Ownership of a global, multi-million dollar paid media function

• Direct exposure to executive leadership and CEO

• Strong in-house creative and analytics capability (you won’t be flying blind)

• Real focus on experimentation, innovation and AI-driven growth

• Opportunity to shape the future of a high-impact acquisition channel

If you’re looking for a role where you can operate at scale, influence strategy and push the boundaries of paid growth, this is a standout opportunity.  Apply online or call Michelle Rubinstein at The Onset - 0413 463 043.