Head of Software Engineering

This role can be based in West Coast US or Canada time zones. Our HQ is in Adelaide, Australia and our teams are distributed across Australia, North and South America.

Lead the engineering team building the AI-powered platform that's transforming how the world discovers critical minerals for renewable energy. In this role, you'll drive architecture and development of the ExoSphere Platform: a subsurface intelligence tool for mineral explorers in the AI era. Exploration is a data problem, and the ExoSphere Platform brings together our satellite-connected geophysical datasets, other customer datasets, and cutting edge machine learning models in a collaborative 3D workspace – all to enable truly agile decision-making, and accelerate discovery.

You'll manage a team of software engineers, with expectations to grow the team substantially in the coming months. You'll independently craft and execute technical architectures and roadmaps, guided by customer obsession and deep collaboration with geoscientists, data scientists, product managers, and other stakeholders across Fleet. You'll bring to bear your deep expertise in cloud application architecture, AI, and machine learning, ensuring ExoSphere Platform remains at the forefront of innovation in mineral exploration – and shipping to customers at startup pace.

Your role will be central to Fleet's mission to accelerate the renewable energy transition, with high visibility and strategic impact across the company.

You will:

- Drive architecture and development of the ExoSphere Platform: a subsurface intelligence tool for mineral explorers in the AI era

- Lead, grow, and coach a distributed team of software engineers, with expectations to grow the team substantially in the coming months

- Provide technical leadership in cloud application architecture, AI, and machine learning, ensuring ExoSphere Platform remains at the forefront of innovation in mineral exploration

- Partner with Product Management to bring clarity and technical design to the roadmap, ensuring predictability of execution

- Architect and scale robust cloud and data infrastructure, ensuring a seamless and powerful foundation for platform growth

- Collaborate closely with geoscientists, data scientists, product managers, and other stakeholders across Fleet

- Mature the software engineering culture of the platform team, establishing best practices for technical design rituals and assets, AI assisted development, code quality, testing, and CI/CD

- Ship to customers at startup pace

- Be central to Fleet's mission to accelerate the renewable energy transition, with high visibility and strategic impact across the company

Qualifications and Experience Required (Must-Have)

- Proven experience in building, leading, and growing high-performing, multidisciplinary cloud software development teams within scale-up tech companies

- Technical leadership experience in the development of a cloud-based platform, ideally featuring large-scale geospatial or scientific datasets and 3D interactive user experiences

- Deep, hands-on experience building on AWS, GCP, or Azure

- Proven ability to deliver at pace in a venture-backed startup or equivalent high-growth, ambiguous environment

Preferred (Nice-to-Have)

- A Master's in Computer Science, Engineering, Geosciences, or a related field

- Experience in the resources, energy, or technology sectors

- Background in scaling a platform from an early stage to a mature, customer-facing product

- Deep expertise in software development, MLOps frameworks and Site Reliability

- A history of thought leadership, such as publications or speaking engagements at relevant industry conferences

- Experience contributing to or managing open-source projects

About Fleet Space

Fleet Space Technologies vision from the beginning was to build technologies to help humanity explore and connect the Earth, Moon, and Mars.

This led us to develop and launch one of Australia's largest constellation of satellites, create our satellite-enabled mineral exploration technology (ExoSphere), and send Australia's first seismic technology (SPIDER) to the Moon in 2026. ExoSphere, our end-to-end mineral exploration solution powered by space and AI, aims to accelerate critical mineral discovery needed for the clean energy technologies foundational to humanity's clean energy future.

As part of Fleet's founding vision, we also apply our technology to innovative solutions for defense and space exploration, including an upcoming mission to the Moon. Headquartered in Adelaide, South Australia, Fleet has rapidly grown to over 160 employees including a growing team in the USA, Canada, and beyond.

We have raised over $200M AUD in venture funding, backed by premier investors including Blackbird, TVG, Grok, and In-Q-Tel including our most recent $150m AUD Series D in December 2024, at a valuation of over $800m AUD. In 2023 we were recognised by the Australian Financial Review (AFR) as the #1 fastest growing technology company in Australia.

Company Culture

As a company, we are revolutionising the exploration of new worlds with advanced space technology to build a more prosperous future for humanity. As a culture, we are ambitious, innovative, and collaborative and we put our customers first in everything that we do.

Our company values guide us to our North Star of ambitious, collaborative success - AD ASTRA ("To the Stars!")

- Add Value:

Obsessively add value for our customers

- Drive Excellence:

Benchmark against the best

- Agile Action:

Take Action. Independent, fast, frugal action

- Seek Truth:

Be curious. Explore

- Take Responsibility:

Make decisions and own them

- Radical Ideas:

We are unique. We do things differently

- Always Deliver:

We always find a way to get it done on time

Fleet is an Equal Opportunity Employer; employment with Fleet is governed on the basis of merit, competence and qualifications and will not be influenced in any manner by race, colour, religion, gender, national origin/ethnicity, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, mental or physical disability or any other legally protected status.