Senior Applications Engineer

The opportunity

A Sydney-headquartered deeptech scaleup is hiring an Applications Engineer to be the senior technical owner of customer design-ins on their AI-powered thermal sensor product. The team is small, the engineering bar is high, and you would be the bridge between the company's internal hardware, firmware and product teams and the engineering teams inside customer OEMs.

This is one of the most credible deeptech sensor commercialisation stories in Australia right now. The product is in mass production and shipping to OEM and channel partners across APAC, Europe and North America. It is Series-A backed by tier-1 deeptech investors.

This search is being run by Sonitec on a confidential basis. The client is disclosed only after a confidentiality conversation.

About the company

• Sydney HQ. Series-A backed. In mass production since late 2023.

• Patented AI-powered thermal sensing for commercial real estate, industrial monitoring, connected-care and pest management.

• Live OEM and channel partnerships in APAC, Europe and the Americas.

• Small, technically deep team; founder-led engineering culture.

What would you do

• Own customer design-ins end-to-end — first sensor evaluation through to a shipping integrated product — across six to ten concurrent customers.

• Lead technical conversations with customer engineering teams on sensor integration, system architecture, MCU and connectivity choices, schematic and PCB review.

• Diagnose hardware-to-firmware problems across the full stack: signal integrity, timing, firmware configuration, protocol failures, and environmental factors.

• Read, modify and debug sample and SDK code on customer MCU platforms; write Python for debug, validation and test-automation workflows.

• Run real-world product trials in customer environments — on-site with a logic analyser and a lab kit when it matters.

• Produce the materials that scale the function — integration documentation, reference designs, sample code, and developer-community content.

• Carry the voice of the customer back into product and engineering, and follow through.

About you

This is an autonomy-first role. The right person stands alone with customer engineering teams — sets the technical agenda, owns escalations, makes judgement calls under incomplete information, and pulls in internal engineering only when the problem genuinely needs it. Demonstrated autonomy matters more than total years.

You bring

• 5–10+ years of customer-facing engineering experience, weighted on demonstrated autonomy at this level today.

• Embedded MCU experience on at least one of: Nordic nRF52 (832 / 840), Espressif ESP32 (C3 / WROVER), or Silicon Labs (EFR32 / EFM32). STM32, NXP or Renesas accepted as transferable.

• Embedded C and C++ — depth to read, modify and debug sample, SDK and integration code.

• Strong Python for debug scripts, validation harnesses and test automation, in daily use.

• Hands-on with the building-automation and connected-hardware protocol stack: I²C, SPI, UART, BLE, KNX, DALI, TCP/IP, MQTT.

• System-level debug fluency with oscilloscope, logic analyser, J-Link, GDB and serial consoles.

• Reads schematics and PCB layouts — spots integration risks at the layout level.

• Mechatronics or embedded-systems mindset — mechanical, electrical and firmware comfortably in the same head.

• At least one B2B hardware product successfully deployed in the field at meaningful volume.

• Bachelor's degree in Mechatronics, Electrical, Electronic, Embedded or Computer Systems Engineering.

• · Full Australian working rights. Sydney-based; not open to overseas relocation.

Bonus points

• Opto-mechanical or imaging-sensor integration experience (vision, IR, photonic, thermal).

• Thermal sensing exposure in any form.

• RTOS exposure (Zephyr, FreeRTOS).

• Smart-buildings, commercial real estate, industrial-asset-monitoring or lighting-controls background.

What is on offer

• Senior IC role with real autonomy and visibility — the kind of role where individual impact is felt.

• Base salary AUD $140,000–$165,000, plus superannuation, plus ESOP.

• 4 days per week in office at St Leonards, Sydney; 1 flex day.

• Travel: Australia first, then international (Europe or the Americas) from month 6–12.

• Small, technically-led team. Innovation-first, integrity-driven, collaborative, results-focused, and intentionally warm.

apply here:

All approaches are treated in strict confidence. The Sonitec recruitment team will respond to every application that meets the minimum technical bar. The client is disclosed only after a confidentiality conversation.