Staff Machine Learning Engineer
About the job
- A foundation in research and development to help drive technical direction and prioritization for faster iteration.
- Demonstrated ability to set machine learning platform standards and interactions across teams, influence engineering roadmaps without direct authority, and drive alignment on complex infrastructure decisions.
- Significant technical experience running deep learning at scale, with a track record of designing and operating systems that other machine learning engineers depend on.
- Experience building training data warehouses and bringing data systems to machine learning readiness.
- Deep hands-on expertise building machine learning infrastructure at scale, particularly training pipelines, distributed compute, model serving, and model monitoring.
- Deep familiarity with model monitoring, data quality frameworks, and operational practices required to maintain a diverse portfolio of production machine learning models.
- Strong proficiency in Python and PyTorch or an equivalent framework, with deep learning expertise.
- Demonstrated software engineering fundamentals across system design, code quality, and scalability.
- Solid experience with cloud infrastructure such as Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, or Microsoft Azure; container orchestration such as Kubernetes and Docker; and custom on-premises or neocloud offerings.
- Own the machine learning platform strategy end-to-end by defining and driving the multi-year technical roadmap for training pipelines, serving architecture, experiment management, and monitoring systems.
- Develop foundational infrastructure and tooling that accelerates machine learning delivery, standardizes workflows, and reduces friction between experimentation and deployment.
- Enable training across distributed data with residency and security requirements while ensuring models run efficiently across varied graphics processing unit hardware, including sparse tensor implementations and architecture bottlenecks.
- Define scalable serving systems that handle spiky production loads and support experimentation across regions, customers, tasks, and verticals.
- Identify barriers to team productivity, define contracts and interfaces between training, evaluation, and serving, and build the roadmap for turning research into routine delivery.
- Develop and deploy multimodal spatial frontier models using point-cloud, geospatial, and asset data for utility and other vertical customers.
- Build infrastructure that enables efficient and economical development and deployment of machine learning models to customers.
- Proficiency in writing and optimizing custom Compute Unified Device Architecture kernels for deep learning training.
About the company
Neara builds a SaaS platform that creates a precise 3D digital twin of critical infrastructure networks, such as electricity grids, transport, and telecom, by integrating GIS data, LiDAR imagery, and engineering specifications. It uses physics-based simulations and AI to test how assets respond to real-world scenarios like extreme weather, load growth, and design changes, helping utilities identify vulnerabilities, assess risks, optimize maintenance, and plan upgrades. The company differentiates itself with engineering-grade, physics-driven network models across multiple sectors and has demonstrated faster risk detection and quicker power restoration for major utilities worldwide. Its goal is to shift utility operators from reactive maintenance to proactive, data-driven risk management, support the energy transition, and expand the platform to telecommunications and public transportation through international growth.
Company Size
201-500
Company Stage
Series D
Total Funding
$114.9M
Headquarters
Sydney, Australia
Founded
2016
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Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- February 2026 Series D raised A$90 million, valuing Neara at A$1.1 billion.
- Neara models 15 million assets across four continents, proving international demand.
- March 2026 UK super-storm modeling exposed 3.5 million people at outage risk, boosting urgency.
What critics are saying
- Utilities can delay enterprise software renewals during 2027 budget cycles and regulatory reviews.
- Sharper Shape, Bentley Systems, and GE Vernova attack neighboring grid analytics budgets.
- If model accuracy fails in wildfire or storm planning, Neara loses credibility with regulators.
What makes Neara unique
- Physics-enabled digital twins model grids with engineering-grade sag, load, and flood behavior.
- Neara covers close to 90% of Australia's network utilities, creating local market lock-in.
- Former Adobe CPO Ian Wang joined in September 2026 to deepen AI product execution.
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Benefits
Flexible Work Hours
Health Insurance
401(k) Retirement Plan
Stock Options
ESOP
Wellness Program
Mental Health Support
Growth & Insights and Company News
6 month growth
0%1 year growth
0%2 year growth
-1%Neara expands executive leadership team with new Chief Product Officer. International AI-product veteran brings enterprise expertise to power Neara's next phase of growth. Neara, the pioneer of physics-enabled digital twin modelling for critical infrastructure, has appointed Ian Wang as its new Chief Product Officer (CPO). The role was previously held by company co-founder Karamvir Singh, who has moved into the Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) position to prioritise integration and go-to-market expansion opportunities. Ian brings two decades of technology product leadership and corporate strategy experience to Neara, including his most recent role as Adobe's Vice President and Head of Product in the United States. In this position, Ian led the global product team for Adobe Express across core product, growth and agentic AI to make creativity approachable for everyone. During his tenure, Adobe Express became a key driver for the company's rapidly expanding reach of over a billion monthly active users, including in 99 per cent of Fortune 500 companies. Ian was also a key product leader for Adobe's AI efforts, where he was also responsible for the platform teams enabling Adobe's next-gen AI product roadmap, including Express, Firefly and GenStudio. As Neara CPO, Ian will bring product management, engineering, and design function experience together under his leadership. He will focus on accelerating Neara's mission to help customers address their most important decisions by combining deep engineering-grade rigour with AI and insights at scale within highly regulated ecosystems. Neara's native AI product pipeline is a central pillar of the company's differentiated value proposition. Data enriched with Neara's spatial and engineering-grade insights creates meaningful connections between assets and physical behaviour, giving Neara the unique context required to operate in ecosystems needing deep domain expertise. Ian's leadership will extend Neara's AI differentiation and impact, supporting critical infrastructure operators far beyond energy. Neara CEO, Daniel Danilatos, said on the appointment: "Ian is no stranger to Neara. An early collaborator who's remained connected to the company, our team and our ambitions over the last decade. In that time, Neara has established its position as the leading energy infrastructure physics platform powering global utilities' most important decisions, but our ambition doesn't end here. We've more than doubled our headcount in the last twelve months, and as we continue to grow and scale for broader critical infrastructure, Ian brings exactly the expertise and experience needed to execute our product roadmap." "It's an incredibly exciting time to join Neara, a homegrown technology and innovation leader operating at the forefront of one of the world's most complex industries," said Ian Wang, Neara Chief Product Officer. "Infrastructure owners and operators need solutions that can bring together the domain depth, network-wide scale, and intelligence that enable holistic insights to make better, more confident decisions. I could not be more excited to be a part of advancing Neara's product vision and portfolio to fundamentally change the role of digital twins in infrastructure."
Regulation shouldn't pick the winners in payments. Comeback kid. Neara brings Silicon Valley to Sydney. 7:30am on 29 September 2026 Get Letter of Intent in your inbox. Every M&A, capital markets and VC deal. Sent weekdays. Good morning. Former Adobe product executive Ian Wang is back in Sydney as Neara's chief product officer and hoping to recreate some Silicon Valley magic at home. His move runs counter to the flow of Australian founders and tech executives moving to San Francisco for its latest gold rush. Wang told Capital Brief Aussie companies need to match the talent, technology and ambition expats find overseas - and change their mindset. "People in San Francisco right now [are] optimistic and heavily paranoid at the same time. They don't rest on their laurels," he said. | | | ASX 200 | 8,680 | +0.17% | | | | ASX futures | 8,721 | +0.01% | | | | S&P 500 | 7,684 | -0.77% | | | | NASDAQ | 26,820 | -0.92% | | | | AUD/USD | 0.70 | -0.09% | | | | Bitcoin | 83,508 | -1.20% | ASX 200 as at market close. Bitcoin in USD. Market movers. | | | ASX: NST | $23.47 | +6.15% | Northern Star shares rose Monday after it confirmed it had received - and rejected - a $38.7 billion takeover offer from South African miner Gold Fields, which then told investors it would continue to pursue the deal. The quick sync. * Investors are warning tax breaks for Australian startups are too complicated to be useful. (Capital Brief) * The RBA is losing patience with the stalled payments system migration and may set a roadmap without waiting for industry consensus. (Capital Brief) Card surcharges may be going away, but payment costs aren't. The RBA should protect competition and innovation as it shapes the system's future. Diane Tate · 12:23am today Wall Street hedge fund Millennium is building a Sydney beachhead, hiring prominent investors and making bets across the ASX and neocloud sector. John McDuling · 11:51pm yesterday The business community is bracing as the RBA's mandated changes to surcharging kick in overnight, with mixed feelings from businesses and payment providers and further calls for reform. Rose Mackenzie · 10:01pm yesterday
Digital twin startup Neara raises $63M to help power companies cope with AI's energy demands - SiliconANGLE
Neara raises $90 million to solve the global infrastructure crisis with AI. Eco Voice | February 10, 2026 | Reply Neara, the pioneer of physics-enabled digital twin modelling for critical infrastructure, today announced it has closed an AUD 90 million Series D funding round to accelerate its focus on solving global infrastructure challenges. The round was led by TCV, a leading global growth equity firm, which has previously invested in technology companies including Netflix, Revolut, Spotify, Toast, Clio, Employment Hero, Nubank, SiteMinder and Xero. Returning investors included Partners Group, EQT, Square Peg Capital, and Skip Capital, further validating Neara's market-defining position as the category creator of next-generation digital twins. Building on Neara's AUD 45 million Series C in late 2024, total funds raised to date have reached approximately AUD 180 million. As the world grapples with a series of interconnected challenges - ageing grid infrastructure, ambitious energy transition goals, and the explosive growth of AI compute and data centres - Neara is uniquely positioned to address the most significant challenge constraining all of their potential progress: access to energy. Both the AI and data centre boom require immense amounts of energy, with global electricity consumption for data centres projected to more than double by 2030, highlighting the urgent need to enhance existing strategies to accelerate access to the grid. Neara's physics-enabled digital twin technology fundamentally solves this need, identifying significant underutilised existing network capacity, accelerating new network infrastructure and renewable generation connections, and ensuring grid resilience and reliability in an era of unprecedented demand. "Power grids all over the world are reaching their limits under the combined pressure of AI, electrification, and rapidly rising demand. Across energy, transport, and communications, systems built for a different era are now being pushed beyond their design assumptions. The world needs faster, more intelligent ways to understand what infrastructure is really capable of and how it behaves in the contexts that matter most. Neara grounds every simulation analysis in real-world physics, giving asset owners and operators the confidence to stretch capacity, manage risk, and invest where it matters most for both today's constraints and the demands of the future," said Jack Curtis, Co-founder and Chief Commercial Officer at Neara. Neara's extensive work navigating the complexities of the energy transition includes partnerships with global utilities, including Southern California Edison and CenterPoint Energy, in the United States. Its European team has worked with customers spanning ESB Networks (Ireland), Scottish Power (UK), and Hedno (Greece). In Australia, Neara works with close to 90% of all network utilities in Australia, including Essential Energy, Endeavour Energy, Ausgrid, Ausnet, Powercor, and SA Power Networks. The funding from this round will accelerate Neara's global talent pipeline of machine learning and AI engineers to develop the technology needed to solve the world's most critical infrastructure challenges, in addition to further expanding Neara's international commercial footprint. "This investment marks TCV's third investment in an Australian-founded, category-defining technology," said Muz Ashraf, General Partner, TCV. "We believe the infrastructure challenges facing the world, from climate resilience to energy access for AI compute require fundamentally new approaches. Neara's highly differentiated, physics-enabled digital twin platform is a leap forward in how utilities manage their grids. We look forward to supporting Neara in their growth journey as they work to expand their impact globally." Neara's technology has already demonstrated a transformative impact across global infrastructure networks, modelling over 15 million assets covering more than 3 million kilometres across four continents. Through its physics-enabled approach, global utilities are identifying and reducing reliability risks, bringing new infrastructure online 85 per cent faster, and delivering eight-and nine-figure cost savings by consolidating multiple workflows, such as planning, design, and vegetation management, on a single platform. With this raise, Neara cements its position as the creator of a new category of infrastructure intelligence. As infrastructure networks are pushed closer to their physical limits, understanding them requires more than heuristics and statistical models. Neara provides the missing foundational layer for risk- and value-optimised assets: physics-enabled digital twins that ground every decision in real-world engineering reality. This physics-based substrate sets the new standard for how modern infrastructure is understood, planned, and operated. About Neara. Neara is a physics-enabled digital twin that creates a geometrically accurate 3D model of entire infrastructure networks. It applies detailed, asset-level engineering-grade analysis across integrated systems, delivering a context-rich view of how infrastructure behaves and responds in real-world conditions and scenarios. By combining engineering-grade precision with network-wide intelligence through high-velocity, automated analysis, Neara enables safer, more resilient systems and better-informed investment decisions. Neara has modelled 15 million assets globally across over 2 million miles of infrastructure. More information is available at www.neara.com. Independent news is important. Enjoy reading Eco Voice? Please help Eco Voice by purchasing a GIFT Voucher or send one to a friend and encourage people to purchase trees or seeds via The Native Shop - www.nativeshop.com.au Plants, seeds & more delivered to your door! Eco Voice is an independent publication that relies on contributions from its readers. Eco Voice is building an independent media platform with a clear focus on sustainability, supporting the community and not-for-profit organisations, and giving a voice to environmental issues. With your kind support Eco Voice can all make an impact. Please become part of its team HERE! 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Red Dot Analytics, a Singapore-based AI and digital twin technology company for data centres, has raised several million dollars in a pre-A funding round led by Granite Asia. The Nanyang Technological University spin-off will use the funds to expand across Asia-Pacific and develop new AI frameworks for data centre infrastructure. The company's platform aims to reduce energy consumption and operating risks as data centres face increasing electricity demand. Energy expenses represent 30-50% of total operating costs for data centres, which collectively consume more electricity than some countries. Red Dot Analytics was founded by Professor Yonggang Wen and is led by CEO Dr Jimin Jia. The company's launch aligns with Singapore's Green Data Centre Roadmap targeting improved energy efficiency.