Engineering Manager

First Mode is a creative engineering company solving the toughest problems on and off the planet, with the goal of having an outsized impact on the world around us. We build the barely possible.

From our state-of-the-art manufacturing and production facilities in Seattle and Perth, we design and deliver resilient, reliable solutions for the most demanding and constrained frontiers in existence. In the last year our engineers built a 2MW hydrogen fuel cell and battery powerplant to retrofit a three-story, 300-metric-ton-capacity diesel haul truck; designed the power source and refueling system for the world's first endurance race vehicle to be powered by liquid hydrogen; and delivered spaceflight hardware headed 370 million kilometers from Earth to asteroid 16 Psyche.

While each project is unique, we typically meld together robotics, automation, systems engineering, modeling and simulation, and advanced fabrication to create a new future across many industries. If you have exceptional talent and a vision for the future, we want to talk.

First Mode is seeking to add an

• Engineering Manager
• to its Perth team, our Engineering Managers
• provide a supportive structure to enable First Mode's engineering staff to do their best work. They advocate for members of the engineering staff, representing their interests to balance against the needs of the product or program where they work. You may be an experienced people manager, or an engineer who has gravitated towards enabling your teammates. Either way, you've spent some time working as an engineer, but want to make supporting and advocating for people the focus of your next role.

The focus of this role is very much on the people and organization, not a product or technical work. Your measure of success will be in the success of the people on your team, and the growth of the organization to meet First Mode's engineering needs. You need to have enough technical experience to understand and talk about what people are working on, but deep expertise is not required though it would be a bonus, of course!

Part of your focus will be on people management - support, career development planning, and soft-skills mentoring of the people in your group. It will also mean helping to mentor and grow our engineers who are growing into leadership and people-care positions, many for the first time. Another major component will be planning and driving the growth of our engineering teams - workforce planning, planning career and skills development to internally grow the skills we'll need in the future, and working with our recruiting team to identify and hire the great engineers we need meet our expected demands.