Job Description

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.