Lead Software Engineer | Engineering Manager – BlastIQ …, Richmond Vale

About Orica Orica is a world leader in mining and civil blasting, with a diverse team of more than 13,000 professionals across the globe. The company is focused on digital and automated technologies to improve mining operations. About the role You will serve as a technical leader for BlastIQ, the software suite that plans, controls, and reconciles drill and blast operations on mine sites worldwide. BlastIQ is part of Orica Digital Solutions, a $300m global business digitising the mining workflow. The role can be an Engineering Manager or Lead Engineer, depending on experience and readiness for people‑leadership responsibilities. Product & System BlastIQ runs the planning, execution, and reconciliation of explosives loading on surface and underground mines. It consists of a cloud backend (.NET 10, ASP.NET Core, Azure CosmosDB and a SQL event store), a Windows tablet application for field use, background workers for event projection, and domain logic that directly impacts mine productivity and safety. What you will be doing
- Designing and evolving the architecture of BlastIQ across cloud and field device tiers.
- Learning the existing system to identify simplifications, removals, or reshaping opportunities.
- Designing event schemas and projection models, ensuring versioning and backwards compatibility.
- Designing database and API contract schemas, versioning external API surfaces.
- Writing production code, reviewing pull requests, and setting the technical bar by example.
- Leading incident response and the engineering side of customer‑impacting production issues.
- Prioritising work across multiple projects while balancing feature delivery and architectural debt.
- Collaborating with Product, UX, and Subject Matter Experts to translate mining domain requirements into well‑modelled software.
- Partnering with peer Engineering Managers and Leads on cross‑product features such as identity, authorisation, licensing, auditing, alerting, and configuration.
- (Engineering Manager track) Managing individual contributors and team leads’ performance, growth, hiring, and team shape.
- (Lead Engineer track) Mentoring and coordinating a small group of engineers, with growing responsibility for people decisions over time. What you will bring Required technical
- Robust fluency in C#/.NET and modern cloud application architecture, ideally in multi‑tenanted SaaS.
- Comfortable reasoning about distributed systems, eventual consistency, ordering, replay, and partial failure; ability to learn an event‑sourced codebase quickly.
- Solid relational and document database design experience, including schema evolution.
- Experience delivering highly available, observable software in production.
- Comfortable reading a large, mature codebase and forming defensible design views.
- Understands the costs of complexity in long‑lived systems and chooses maintenance‑friendly designs.
- Strong written and spoken communication skills, able to explain complex designs to engineers, product, and non‑technical stakeholders. Required for Engineering Manager track
- Experience leading a team of engineers, ideally managing team leads or other managers.
- Track record of growing engineers and shaping team culture. Highly desirable
- Experience with event‑sourced or event‑driven architectures, including event schema design and replay management.
- Experience with offline‑capable, occasionally connected systems and sync challenges.
- Experience with spatial and/or temporal data.
- Experience with authentication (OIDC) and multi‑tenanted resource‑based authorisation.
- Experience building shared platform services consumed by multiple product teams. Tech stack
- Backend: .NET 10 C# services, event‑sourced over a SQL event store with Azure CosmosDB read model projections.
- Web & device UI: React TypeScript for cloud UIs; Angular TypeScript for the field device UI on Windows tablets with .NET, Kestrel, and SQLite.
- Mobile: .NET MAUI.
- Identity: Duende Identity Server (OIDC).
- Cloud: Azure PaaS (App Service, SQL, CosmosDB, Event Hubs, Service Bus, Blob Storage).
- Infrastructure as code: ARM and Bicep.
- CI/CD & observability: Azure DevOps, Application Insights, Log Analytics, Defender for Cloud. What we offer
- Real ownership of a product that runs in production on customer sites.
- Scale and impact: every line of code affects mines running 24/7, measurable in tonnes of explosives and rock broken.
- Momentum: sustained product growth and continuous architecture refinement.
- A peer group of engineering managers and leads across BlastIQ and the wider ODS Platform for design reviews.
- Market-competitive salary and benefits commensurate with a global business.
- Flexibility: hybrid (Newcastle) or remote within Australia with scheduled in‑person collaboration. We respect and value all Orica promotes and fosters a culture of inclusion and Equal Opportunity Employment everywhere we operate. We treat our people and applicants with fairness, dignity, and respect, getting the best of everyone’s contributions. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, religion, sexual orientation, gender perception or identity, nationality, age, military or veteran, marital or disability status. #J-18808-Ljbffr Apply on Kit Job: kitjobau.com/job/3rve8p