Senior Product Designer - Strategy / North Star (Concepting + Prototypes)

Sydney (Hybrid) | 6-month day-rate contract | $850-1000/day inc. super

A Sydney-based client is hiring a highly senior visionary Product Designer to shape the future direction of a large scale consumer experience that operates in a blended digital + real world environment.

This position sits outside of the delivery squad and is focused on long term strategy, concept testing and prototype led storytelling. You’ll partner closely with senior stakeholders and an established service design function to define the next chapter of the product and support future investment decisions.

What you’ll be doing

• Creating north star prototypes and future state concepts

• Leading concept testing and exploration of new propositions

• Building a discovery/problem roadmap and feeding insight into delivery teams

• Facilitating workshops and aligning senior stakeholders around direction

• Balancing customer experience with commercial outcomes through strong narrative and storytelling

What we’re looking for

• A senior designer with strong strategic thinking and a product mindset

• Highly confident storytelling and stakeholder influence at senior level

• Strong prototyping capability (low to high fidelity)

• Experience in agency/consulting environments is highly regarded

• Comfortable working autonomously in ambiguity and turning strategy into tangible design direction

• Sydney based with availability for hybrid collaboration and workshops

Contract details

• 6 month contract with high likelihood of extension

• Sydney hybrid

• Day rate guide: $850-1000/day inclusive of super

To apply: please include CV + portfolio link (applications without a portfolio cannot be progressed). You must have full working rights, be based in Sydney and be ready to start in the next 4 weeks. 

Senior Product Designer - Delivery Squad (UI Craft + Motion)

Sydney (Hybrid) | 6-month day-rate contract | $850-1000/day inc. super

A Sydney-based client is entering a major scale-up phase for a high visibility consumer product that blends digital experience with real-world/device-led environments. We are looking for a Senior Product Designer to join the delivery squad and help ship a strong pipeline of customer-facing improvements at pace.

This is a hands-on execution role suited to a designer who thrives in complexity, can go deep into detail, and is comfortable working “thick and fast” - prioritising progress over perfection.

What you’ll be doing

• Embedded in a delivery squad alongside another senior designer (cross functional with Product + Engineering + Research)

• Delivering end-to-end customer experiences across onboarding, guidance, friction reduction and feature enhancement

• Designing in a physical/digital blended environment (device-led experience, real-world constraints)

• Collaborating with a research function and comfortable owning/participating in in-person research

• Partnering with senior stakeholders and navigating a high visibility product environment

Motion design requirement (core)

This role requires strong UI motion capability:

• Building 10-20+ UI animations / micro interactions

• After Effects expertise

• Lottie exports and implementation-friendly workflows

• Contributing to an internal motion/animation library

What we’re looking for

• Senior Product Designer experience within delivery squads

• High level UI craft and interaction design capability

• Proven ability to work fast, iterate rapidly and ship

• Strong collaboration with Engineering/Product and ability to manage stakeholders

• Comfortable working autonomously with minimal handholding

• Sydney based and able to work onsite 2 days per week

Contract details

• 6-month contract with high likelihood of extension (potential perm conversion)

• Sydney hybrid (typically 2 days per week onsite)

• Day rate guide: $800-900 daily rate inclusive of super

To apply: please include CV + portfolio link (applications without a portfolio cannot be progressed). This is an urgent requirement. Please don't apply unless you can start a new role within 4 weeks. You must be based in Sydney with full working rights. 

Senior Scientific Software Engineer, 3D Geometry and Visualisation
Sydney | Full time | Hybrid

The Mission
A global medical technology team designs complex physical products that must fit real human anatomy across massive population diversity. This role exists to turn large scale 3D scan data into practical digital tools that engineers actually use.

You are not building a generic platform. You are building internal software that directly shapes how physical products are designed, sized, and validated.

This is where scientific software meets real-world hardware outcomes.

What You’ll Work On
• Owning and evolving an internal digital anthropometry platform used by engineering teams
• Building cross platform desktop applications using Qt for Python
• Developing interactive 3D visualisation tooling with VTK for shape and fit analysis
• Working hands on with meshes, point clouds, geometry, and population level variation
• Implementing backend algorithms and data processing pipelines that support design decisions
• Translating messy engineering workflows into usable, repeatable software tools
• Driving adoption of digital first workflows across multidisciplinary product teams
• Improving architecture, testing, CI/CD, and long term maintainability without over-engineering

What Matters Here
• Strong experience building software for scientific, engineering, or R&D environments
• Deep comfort working with 3D data, meshes, geometry, and visualisation
• Solid Python engineering fundamentals
• Hands on experience with Qt for Python and VTK or equivalent frameworks
• Enough mathematical and statistical grounding to reason about shape variation and populations
• Ability to work directly with engineers, gather requirements, and influence how tools get used

The Type of Engineer Who Thrives
A scientific programmer who likes owning real tools, not abstract platforms. Someone who enjoys working with geometry, visual data, and physical constraints. Comfortable operating as the only dedicated software engineer in a domain heavy team, and confident enough to challenge workflows when the software can do better.

Not a web generalist. Not a ticket taker. Someone who wants their code to shape real products.

Why This Role Matters
Physical product development is slow and expensive when driven by trial and error. Better digital tools reduce iterations, improve upfront decisions, and raise the quality bar across every product cycle. This role directly influences how efficiently and accurately products are designed.

The "What's In It For Me" Bit
• Senior individual contributor role with clear technical ownership
• Long-term platform work, not short-lived features
• High autonomy and direct access to a varied class of engineering stakeholders
• Exposure to applied 3D geometry, anthropometrics, and medical R&D

If you want to build software where geometry, data, and real world fit actually matter, reach out.

Senior Hardware Production Engineer

(AU Citizenship Required)

Sydney | Full-time | Hybrid

The Mission
A senior hardware team in Sydney builds complex electronic systems that must work first time and continue to work at scale.

The PCB designs are largely completed upstream. This role exists to ensure those designs survive manufacturing, supplier variability, and real-world, rugged conditions.

This is where hardware moves from design intent to repeatable production.

What You’ll Work On
• Reviewing high-speed and RF-adjacent PCB designs for production readiness
• Assessing schematics, layouts, and BOMs with a manufacturing and reliability focus
• Working directly with suppliers to validate components, processes, and incoming quality
• Defining inspection and test approaches that catch issues before they scale
• Investigating failures and driving proper root cause analysis and corrective actions
• Feeding lessons learned back into upstream design teams to improve future revisions
• Supporting audits and quality frameworks without turning engineering into paperwork
• Acting as the technical gate between design and volume production

What Matters Here
• Strong experience with high-speed PCB or RF-influenced designs
• Comfort reviewing and challenging existing designs rather than creating them from scratch
• Hands-on experience with Altium schematics and PCB layouts
• Strong understanding of PCB assembly drawings and manufacturing documentation
• Practical use of quality tools such as FMEA, SPC, 8D and root cause analysis
• Experience working with external suppliers and manufacturing partners
• Familiarity with ISO-style quality management systems

The Type of Engineer Who Thrives Here
An engineer who has seen boards fail in production and understands why. Someone who enjoys tightening tolerances, closing feedback loops, and preventing issues before they reach the field. Design-literate, detail-oriented, and comfortable operating without a management title.

Why This Role Matters
The hardware is non-trivial. The environments are unforgiving. Errors are expensive. This role protects the product and the roadmap by ensuring what gets built matches what was intended, every time.

The Opportunity
• Senior individual contributor role with real technical ownership
• Direct influence on how hardware moves into production at scale
• Close proximity to manufacturing, suppliers, and real failure modes
• Competitive salary + super + bonus

If you want to work on hardware where production realities matter as much as design intent, reach out.

Software Engineering Manager (AI Systems & Engineering Delivery)

If you’re looking for a role where engineering, delivery, and product direction all sit in your hands, this is it.

This team is building the orchestration layer that lets organisations actually use AI in real time, not just talk about it. Their platform is already automating high-stakes workflows for customers who need accuracy, speed, and technical depth. Demand is scaling fast, and they need someone who can keep engineering velocity high without compromising quality, while making key technical and delivery decisions.

The Role

You’ll take ownership of day-to-day planning, delivery, and technical direction across a sharp, senior engineering team. This isn’t a “manager with no context” role, you’ll stay close to the code, work directly with customers, and help shape how the platform evolves as new workloads, integration patterns, and AI use-cases land.

You’ll be deeply involved in prioritisation and trade-off decisions, architecture discussions and system optimisation, delivery pipelines, QA, debugging, and risk management, as well as mentoring engineers and influencing team culture. Think of this role as a hybrid of software engineering lead, project manager, and product delivery owner, with real accountability for outcomes.

Why This Role Matters

The team is building foundational infrastructure for agentic AI, distributed collaboration, and real-time decision-making. Timelines are tight, technical complexity is high, and customers are pushing for more. Your work directly impacts product pace, quality, and the company’s ability to scale sustainably.

You’ll Thrive Here If You

• Have 3+ years leading teams or managing technical delivery in engineering-heavy environments
• Have recent hands-on full-stack experience (Node.js, React, PostgreSQL) — you’ve been coding and shipping in the last 6–18 months
• Understand how to deliver AI-powered products, including practical experience with LLMs (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Llama, etc.)
• Are comfortable across the ecosystem: APIs, agentic frameworks, MCP, RPA, vector databases, distributed systems
• Know how to ship scalable systems on Azure, with strong grounding in API design and real-time collaboration features
• Can make trade-offs, take ownership of decisions, and be accountable for outcomes
• Can juggle multiple client projects, keeping focus while guiding engineers
• Want a seat close to leadership and are ready to influence product direction

Tech You’ll Touch

Node.js, React, PostgreSQL, Redis, pgvector, LangChain, Llama, ChatGPT, Claude, MCP, Azure, Docker, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions CI/CD.

What’s in It for You

• High impact: Your decisions directly drive engineering velocity and customer outcomes
• Real complexity: AI systems, distributed architectures, multi-agent orchestration
• Founder access: Work directly with a deeply technical founding team and some of the best execs and investors in Australia
• Speed & ownership: Minimal bureaucracy, maximum autonomy
• Equity: Early-stage upside in a fast-growing company for the right candidate

Who You Are

• 1Practical, curious, and unflappable
• Recently hands-on in code, but ready to lead a team and make high-stakes decisions
• Loves clarity, hates blockers, and knows how to keep a team aligned without micromanaging
• Comfortable with the messy, iterative nature of AI product development
• Ready to own outcomes, influence culture, and make trade-offs that matter

Interested?

Apply now

Could you be the next Engineering Manager to join a leading Global Healthcare Organisation powering millions of critical decisions across pathology, radiology, and clinical services every year?

After decades of growth, they’re now on a major digital transformation journey: modernising technology, elevating customer experiences, and building digital products that genuinely improve healthcare.

One of the most important and loved products in our ecosystem is a referring-doctor portal used daily to access patient pathology results across Australia.

We’re looking for a hands-on, people-first Engineering Manager to take this product into its next era.

Why this role matters

The portal is stable, highly valued by customers, and has huge opportunities ahead. We’re moving from “feature delivery” to true digital product thinking - focused on performance, customer insights, differentiation, and modern engineering practices.

This role exists to:

• Build and mentor a tight-knit team of capable engineers

• Bring clarity to an under-documented, complex tech ecosystem

• Shape the future technical direction of the portal

• Partner closely with a Product Manager to define strategy & roadmap

• Make high-impact decisions like whether to bring mobile development in-house or how to optimise performance for doctors in high-pressure workflows

This is a role with real autonomy, ownership, and purpose.

What you’ll be doing

Leadership & People

• Lead and grow a team of six engineers (web, integrations, full-stack)

• Provide technical coaching, guidance, and career development

• Create a culture of clarity, strong communication, and continuous improvement

Technical Direction & Delivery

• Set the technical strategy and architecture for the portal

• Be hands-on when needed - solution design, code reviews, technical problem-solving

• Identify performance, reliability, and cost-efficiency improvements

• Influence mobile development strategy

Product & Strategy

• Partner with Product and CX teams to deeply understand customer needs

• Help define the roadmap based on real insights

• Build a comprehensive picture of the current state (data, gaps, tech landscape)

• Drive a shift towards experience-led, customer-centric product thinking

Tech environment

Our stack includes:

• .NET (core), Angular, API integrations

• A long-standing custom Information Management System

• A native mobile app 

• Established DevOps, CI/CD, and internal architecture support

We don’t need a specialist in one area - we need a smart, pragmatic engineering generalist who knows enough across web, backend, integrations, and mobile to make great decisions.

Who you are

You’ll thrive here if you are:

• A hands-on Engineering Manager who still loves solving technical problems

• Strong in solution architecture and able to translate engineering into business outcomes

• Someone who enjoys untangling complex systems with little documentation

• Curious, collaborative, warm - communicates early, often, and clearly

• Motivated by purpose

• Comfortable in environments with legacy tech, complexity, and lots of opportunity

You’re probably not from a hyper-scaled enterprise or a move-fast-break-things startup. You’re likely from that sweet spot in the middle - where you’ve owned products end-to-end, paced delivery well, and rolled up your sleeves alongside the team.

Why join

• Purpose-led work in health-tech

• A genuinely collaborative, values-led team

• Leadership committed to modern engineering practices

• Opportunity to shape the future of digital in a global healthcare organisation

• Hybrid work, stability, and strong long-term career pathways

If you’re an Engineering Manager who enjoys leading with purpose, solving real problems, and guiding a product with massive impact across Australia’s healthcare system - I’d love to chat > Dani - Danielle@theonset.com.au

Product Manager – Loyalty 

Well-known Aussie Retailer | Sydney | 3 days in office 

A highly recognised Australian retailer is seeking an experienced Product Manager to lead the evolution of its real-time loyalty campaigns and personalised offers platform. This role sits at the intersection of customer insight, commercial strategy, and digital product innovation.

You will own the roadmap for loyalty offers and campaign capability, improving how members receive relevant, timely, and value-driven promotions across digital and in-store channels. This is a high-impact role focused on driving measurable outcomes including increased engagement, frequency, and customer lifetime value.

Key responsibilities

• Define and execute the roadmap for loyalty offers and campaign capability
• Translate commercial and customer challenges into scalable product solutions
• Drive personalisation through data, segmentation, and real-time decisioning logic
• Partner with marketing, loyalty, data and engineering teams to deliver cohesive experiences
• Measure performance and continuously optimise promotional effectiveness

What we’re looking for

• Proven Product Manager experience in digital environments
• Background in loyalty, promotions, personalisation or large-scale customer programs
• Strong data-led decision making and commercial mindset
• Experience operating in complex stakeholder environments
• Ability to influence, inspire and drive outcomes across cross-functional teams

This is an opportunity to play a key role in shaping how millions of Australians experience personalised value through one of the country’s most established retail ecosystems.

There’s a moment in every deep-tech hardware company where the tech is no longer the bottleneck; alignment is. The prototypes work, the physics checks out, the market signals are there… but the organisation needs someone who has actually walked the long road from “this should work” to “this works, every time, for customers.”

This role is built for that person - the engineer-turned-leader who has shipped real hardware and carries the quiet confidence of someone who’s done it before.

Your background

This is for someone who has taken hardware from early-stage development through to something customers actually use. The kind of engineer who has watched products move from rough prototypes to working systems, and then into manufacturing. Someone who understands how decisions in one discipline ripple through everything else, and has enough breadth to guide a team with a lot of moving parts.

Different profiles could fit, but the strongest candidates tend to come from:

1. Mechanical engineers with aerodynamics or complex system experience
   People who have worked across structural design, airflow, thermal constraints, and multi-discipline integration. They’ve been close to real testing, real iteration, and real product decisions.

2. Optical engineers with hands-on hardware experience
   Not just pure theory; people who’ve worked on alignment, opto-mechanical assemblies, environmental sensitivity, and the practical side of getting optical systems to behave in real conditions.

3. Photovoltaics or power-system engineers who can work across electronics
   Engineers who understand energy conversion, power electronics, embedded constraints, and how these systems come together in a physical product.

4. Generalist hardware engineers who’ve been in startups before
   People who’ve worked across multiple disciplines out of necessity — embedded, mechanical, power, optics, whatever the product required. They’ve owned customer trials, demos, prototypes, and key design decisions.

Regardless of discipline, the ideal candidate has:

• Real hardware build/test experience

• Exposure to bringing something from R&D into manufacturing

• Comfort managing multi-discipline teams

• The ability to make decisions with incomplete information

• A track record of improving the way engineering teams work

• The clarity to translate technical progress into product direction

• Experience in fast-moving environments where things change quickly

What's in it for you

• You get to take a genuinely new hardware technology to market

• You set the engineering culture

• You have real influence on the product

• You run a proper multi-discipline engineering effort

• You own the R&D → manufacturing shift

• Clear upward trajectory into CTO

If this sounds like something you’d be interested in exploring, please reach out to Thaís at thais@theonset.com.au.

Most firmware jobs ask you to keep the lights on.
This one asks you to push the limits of what silicon can actually do.

You’ll be joining a small, senior-heavy engineering group building next-generation embedded systems where every microamp, every cycle and every byte matters. It’s the kind of work where you can’t hide behind abstraction — you’re operating close to the metal, solving problems that don’t have a Stack Overflow answer, and shaping the behaviour of hardware that didn’t exist a few years ago.

If you want to work somewhere that feels like an engineering lab rather than a product maintenance shop, read on.

What you’ll be doing

• Building and optimising firmware in C for constrained, real-time systems
• Working across RTOS internals: bootloaders, startup code, scheduling, drivers, interrupts, DMA
• Bringing up new boards and SoCs on ARM Cortex or RISC-V architectures
• Writing deterministic, testable code for SPI, I²C, SDIO and other hardware interfaces
• Solving real engineering puzzles — performance, memory, timing, data movement
• Collaborating with silicon, digital, systems and hardware engineers to debug cross-layer issues
• Owning problems end-to-end: from concept to design, implementation and validation on real hardware

What they’re looking for

You’re someone who enjoys thinking deeply about how things work under the hood — not just writing code that compiles, but code that is predictable, efficient and clear.

You’ll thrive here if you have:

• 5+ years in embedded firmware development using C
• Experience with FreeRTOS, RT-Thread, ThreadX, Zephyr or a similar RTOS
• Hands-on bring-up of ARM Cortex or RISC-V systems
• Strong familiarity with interrupt handlers, DMA, low-level drivers and timing constraints
• Solid knowledge of SPI, I²C, SDIO and related protocols
• The ability to reason about state machines, data structures and algorithmic complexity — you care about correctness as much as functionality
• A degree in EE/CE/Comms/CS or equivalent practical depth

Bonus points (not required):

• Experience with secure embedded systems or networking stacks
• Firmware for complex SoCs or semiconductor environments

Why this team stands out
Because they’ve built the kind of engineering environment people don’t leave easily.

• Real engineering culture.
• Hard problems, not maintenance work.
• You get space to think.
• Potential visa sponsorship + relocation support if you’re coming from overseas and are eligible for a working holiday visa.
• Work from anywhere in the world for 10 days a year
• Little things that actually make a difference like free barista-made coffee every day (yes, the proper stuff — and yes, it really does save you ~$1,500 a year).
• The team’s average tenure is 3 years, which is unusually strong for a deep-tech company of 200+ employees in Australia.

If you’re the kind of firmware engineer who likes solving hard problems, not repeating easy ones, let’s talk.

Reach out to Thaís Amorim at The Onset: thais@theonset.com.au.

Principal Product Manager | Financial Services Platform
Full time | Hybrid Sydney

We’re partnering with a fast-growing tech platform scale-up that enables brands to seamlessly offer products inside their customer experience. Their platform is used by well known consumer and digital brands, and they are continuing to scale locally and internationally.

This is a hands-on Principal Product Manager role leading one of the highest impact product areas in the business. You’ll work at the intersection of partner integrations, consumer experience, data and commercial outcomes, helping shape how customers purchase and manage these products in a simple, intuitive way.

The environment suits someone who enjoys ownership, clarity of thinking, and building structure in a fast-moving scale-up.

What you’ll be doing
• Lead product direction for a core customer journey area, working closely with engineering, design, data and growth teams
• Prioritise across multiple partner demands, technical opportunities and customer needs
• Work end-to-end on discovery, shaping problem spaces, sequencing work and guiding execution across one or more squads
• Co-create solutions with engineers, setting clear technical and product boundaries
• Drive commercial and customer outcomes including conversion, retention and partner adoption
• Help uplift product thinking in the team through coaching, structured communication and strong stakeholder management

Why this role matters

The company is experiencing more demand than they can currently service. This role provides the product leadership needed to stabilise the function, make stronger prioritisation calls, and expand what the platform can offer as they enter the next stage of growth.

You’ll be operating where strategy meets execution: shaping direction while staying close to the work and the customer.

What we’re looking for

• Experience as a Senior or Principal Product Manager in a scale-up or modern tech environment
• Strong technical fluency across APIs, integrations, data flows and system interactions
• Ability to navigate B2B2C environments where distribution partners, end users and internal teams each have different needs
• Comfortable leading complex delivery without dedicated delivery managers
• Ability to coach others, influence decisions and handle competing priorities with confidence
• Comfortable in high-growth environments where clarity is something you create, not something given

Backgrounds that often work well: fintech, payments, SaaS platform products, marketplace, embedded finance, digital services, or tech-enabled companies with high integration complexity.

Consulting experience can be valuable if complemented by meaningful hands-on product ownership.

What’s on offer

• ESOP and additional leave benefits
• Hybrid ways of working in Sydney
• Modern tech stack, strong engineering culture, and visible product impact
• External product coaching and clear progression pathways

If you’re a product leader who loves solving complex product problems, influencing direction and shaping a capability that is still growing, we’d love to chat.

Apply now if this feels like a good fit with your experience.