Senior Technical Operations Associate

The Company Atomionics builds quantum sensors and AI that see through the Earth. Our technology replaces decades of guesswork in resource exploration with weeks of high-accuracy insight, helping the world find the critical minerals it needs for the energy transition. We're backed by BHP Ventures, In-Q-Tel, Wavemaker, and others who bet early on paradigm shifts, and we're scaling operations across Singapore, Australia, and North America. This is deep tech at its most tangible: physics that goes into the field, onto moving vehicles and drones, and solves billion-dollar problems underground. Operations here is what makes that possible. The Role We're hiring a Senior Technical Operations Associate to own the layer of operations that requires technical literacy: procurement of engineering components and lab equipment, technical vendor relationships, engineering inventory, and the systems and tools that keep our operational infrastructure running. You'll work alongside our existing team which owns generalist ops, logistics, and deployment coordination. Your lane is the technical one. Engineers will come to you with procurement needs, and you'll come back with sharper market intelligence than they had when they asked—alternative suppliers, equivalent components at better value, lead time trade-offs, vendors worth trusting. You're here to make their decisions better. What You Will Do Own technical procurement end-to-end . You'll handle procurement of engineering components, lab equipment, and technical consumables—from evaluating purchase requests to coordinating with engineering leads on BOM requirements. The expectation is bringing procurement intelligence that engineers don't have time to build themselves. Manage the vendors that matter most . You'll own the Approved Vendor List for technical and engineering suppliers and develop relationships with specialized hardware vendors, component suppliers, and calibration and testing service providers. Credibility is the currency here—engineers need to trust your recommendations, and vendors need to take you seriously. Keep engineering inventory ahead of demand. You'll own tracking of engineering equipment, components, and technical assets, and maintain inventory systems that are accurate, queryable, and genuinely useful. Build and own the operational systems layer . You'll identify and automate operational workflows that are currently running on manual effort. The goal is building systems that scale with the company, not just solve today's problem. Be the technical resource when operations gets complex . When deployments or field operations involve specialized equipment, customs compliance for technical goods, or hardware readiness, you're the technical ops resource working alongside the team that owns the broader coordination. What We're Looking For Must Have A degree in engineering or a related technical discipline. You need enough of a foundation to have credible conversations with engineers about what they're procuring and why. 4–7 years of experience at the interface of engineering and procurement or supply chain. You've been in situations where engineers ask for things and you've come back with better options—not because you were told to push back, but because you knew the market well enough to. Hands-on experience with technical or industrial procurement. You understand specs, lead times, and what questions to ask a vendor before committing. A genuine inclination to automate operational processes rather than repeat them. Self-direction. You should be able to identify what needs to be built before being asked. Good to Have Experience in deep tech, hardware, or industrial environments where procurement mistakes are expensive and lead times are long. Familiarity with inventory or procurement management systems, even if you built something lightweight yourself. Exposure to international logistics or deployment operations involving specialized equipment. Who Thrives Here This role suits someone who finds the operational and technical sides of a deep-tech company equally interesting—someone who gets satisfaction from knowing that the right component arrived on time, from the right vendor, at the right price, because they built the system that made it happen. You should be the kind of person who reads a purchase request and immediately starts thinking about whether there's a better way to fulfill it. If you want to build something more than manage something, and you're drawn …