Principal Engineer

Transient Detect is an angel-backed IoT/AI start-up protecting and extending the life of critical water infrastructure, responsible for combining ultra-efficient TD.Edge hardware with TD.Cloud, a cloud-native analytics platform that detects pressure transients, identifies potential leaks and enables predictive maintenance across critical water networks.

As Principal Engineer, Cloud, you will own the architecture of TD.Cloud and lead the small, growing cloud team as the business scales across utilities, jurisdictions and data volumes. You will set the technical direction across ingestion, storage, big-data and ML pipelines, APIs, platform reliability and validation infrastructure while remaining genuinely hands-on in the codebase.

This is not a pure architecture role, but rather a hands-on technical leadership opportunity to build, scale and protect a cloud platform solving global water security challenges. You will be expected to spend time writing code, reviewing code, debugging production issues, prototyping difficult problems and mentoring the team as it grows.

What you’ll do:

• Own the architecture of TD.Cloud end-to-end across ingestion, storage, analytics, ML and APIs.
• Stay hands-on through coding, code reviews, production debugging and prototyping.
• Lead the ML operations discipline behind the analytics platform, including model lifecycle, evaluation, monitoring, drift and retraining in production.
• Engineer for global deployment across data residency, regulatory requirements and multi-jurisdiction operations.
• Own SLOs across velocity, cost, reliability, performance and cyber security.
• Drive cloud unit economics, including cost per device, per event and per tenant.
• Embed AI where it increases team output across coding, review, testing, operations and documentation.
• Protect Transient Detect’s cloud-side IP across algorithms, models, data and architecture.

Nice to have:

• Experience building software for engineering disciplines such as utilities, civil, mechanical or electrical.
• Water industry knowledge or exposure to utilities and critical infrastructure.
• Hands-on experience with IoT platforms deployed globally or across diverse environments.
• Production MLOps experience, including versioning, evaluation, monitoring and retraining.

About you:

• Minimum 10+ years of cloud engineering experience across a range of technologies, platforms and solutions.
• Proven experience scaling a platform from one order of magnitude to the next.
• A genuine architect-builder mix, with the ability to set direction while remaining close to the codebase.
• Strong big-data capability, ideally with IoT or high-volume telemetry workloads.
• Comfortable owning the full picture across velocity, cost, reliability, performance and cyber security.
• Strong systems thinking, technical judgement and practical problem-solving capability.

This role will suit a hands-on technical leader with deep cloud engineering capability, strong architectural judgement and the ability to build scalable, reliable and cost-effective platforms in an environment where meaningful technology matters. Interested candidates are invited to apply by contacting Mina Jafari at TESS Search Partners on (08) 7093 9945 or apply via the link.