Lead Software Engineer | Engineering Manager - BlastIQ

About Orica

At Orica, it’s the power of our people that leads change and shapes our futures.  Every day, all around the world, our people help mobilise vital resources essential to progress. Established in 1874, we have grown to become the world leader in mining and civil blasting with a diverse of team of more than 13,000 across the world. 

It’s an exciting time to join us – we are shaping the future of mining through digital and automated technologies, embracing new ways of thinking, pioneering innovation and reimagining the way we work.

About the role

We are hiring a technical leader for BlastIQ, the software suite that plans, controls and reconciles drill and blast operations on mine sites worldwide. BlastIQ sits inside Orica Digital Solutions — a $300m+ global business digitising the mining workflow — and is the product that connects information back to the blast itself, where most of the value in a mine is created or lost. The work you do here moves the needle on a measurable part of the mining value chain. 

The scale is real. Mines run 24/7, and every year BlastIQ helps plan and execute roughly 38,000 blasts, 9 million holes, and 2.2 million tonnes of explosives across the globe. 

This is a hands-on technical role with people leadership responsibilities. We are looking for someone who loves solving complex problems with simple solutions.

There are two possible shapes for this role: 

• Engineering Manager — for candidates with both deep technical capability and prior experience leading engineers, including managing leads or other managers.

• Lead Engineer — for candidates with the technical capability who are not yet ready for the full scope of the EM role. 

The role reports to the Head of Engineering. As Engineering Manager, you would have five direct reports (three individual contributors and two team leads), with twelve engineers in the wider group. As Lead Engineer, you would have three direct reports; the two existing team leads would continue reporting to the Head of Engineering. 

Technical depth is the most important quality we are looking for. The system is large, event-sourced, and spans cloud and field device tiers, and we need a leader who can engage with it deeply — read the code, shape the architecture, and write production code alongside the team. If you are a strong engineer who has not yet managed people but is ready to grow into that responsibility, we would like to hear from you. 

The team is a mixture of remote and hybrid (Newcastle based). You will work with engineers, product managers, UX designers and mining subject matter experts distributed across Australia and overseas. 

The product & system

BlastIQ runs the planning, execution and reconciliation of explosives loading on surface and underground mines. It spans: 

• A cloud backend (.NET 10, ASP.NET Core, Azure CosmosDB read models over a SQL event store) that ingests design data, projects it into queryable views, and exposes external APIs consumed by customer integrations and design packages.
• A Windows tablet application that runs in the field, often disconnected, with its own event store and a local HTTP API consumed by an Angular UI and the MMU (Mobile Manufacturing Unit) control system that physically loads the explosives. It runs on commodity tablet hardware in harsh conditions, with operators who cannot wait — so memory footprint, startup time and runtime performance are first class design constraints, not afterthoughts.
• Background workers for event projection, change feed driven downstream sync, and maintenance.
• Domain logic for how a blast is planned, loaded and executed. The domain has real depth, and the quality of what the software produces has a tangible impact on mine productivity and safety. 

The system is actively evolving, and this role plays a key part in shaping its future technical direction - contributing architectural ideas and improving how it scales, performs, and supports real world mining operations.

What you will be doing

• Designing and evolving the architecture of BlastIQ across cloud and field device tiers.
• Learning the existing system deeply enough to identify where it should be simplified, removed, or reshaped — not just where features can be added — and making the case for those changes
• Designing event schemas and projection models, with full awareness of versioning, backwards compatibility for older field devices, and out of order delivery.
• Designing database and API contract schemas; carefully versioning the external API surface used by customer integrations and design packages.
• 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 simultaneous projects and balancing feature delivery against architectural debt. Partnering with Product, UX and Subject Matter Experts to translate mining domain requirements into well modelled software.
• Collaborating with peer Engineering Managers and Leads on features that cross product boundaries (identity, authorisation, licensing, auditing, alerting, 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  

• Strong fluency in C# / .NET and modern cloud application architecture, ideally in multi-tenanted SaaS.
• Comfortable reasoning about distributed systems — eventual consistency, ordering, replay, partial failure — and able 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 a defensible view on what to change.
• Understands the costs of complexity in long lived systems and chooses designs that minimise ongoing maintenance burden.
• Strong written and spoken communication — you can explain a complex design to engineers, product, and non-technical stakeholders. 

Required for the Engineering Manager track 

•  Experience leading a team of engineers, ideally including managing team leads or other managers.
• A track record of growing engineers and shaping team culture. 

Highly desirable 

• Demonstrable experience with event-sourced or event-driven architectures — designing event schemas, reasoning about ordering and replay, and operating them in production.
• Experience with offline capable, occasionally connected systems and the sync challenges that come with them.
• 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.

The 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 running .NET, Kestrel and SQLite.
• Mobile. .NET MAUI.
• Identity. Duende Identity Server.
• Cloud. Azure PaaS — App Service, SQL, CosmosDB, Event Hubs, Service Bus, Blob Storage. Infrastructure as code in ARM and Bicep.
• CI/CD & observability. Azure DevOps for CI/CD. Observability via Application Insights, Log Analytics, and Defender for Cloud.

What we offer

• Real ownership of a real product. You will set the technical direction for software that runs on customer sites in production today, not a research project or an internal tool.
• Scale and impact you can point to. Every line of code you ship is in front of mines running 24/7 and is measurable in tonnes of explosives used and rock broken.
• Momentum. Sustained product growth — we are constantly adding features, expanding the customer problems we solve, and reshaping the architecture to lower cost of ownership and unlock the next set of problems.
• A peer group of engineering managers and leads across BlastIQ and the wider ODS Platform to design and review with.
• A competitive salary and the benefits you'd expect of a global business.
• Flexibility. Hybrid (Newcastle) or remote within Australia, with deliberate time together for design and teamwork.

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.