Lead Systems Design Engineer

We automate drill-and-blast design and short-term planning for open-pit and underground mines. A surveyed bench goes in; the pattern a driller actually drills comes out — construction lines, hole positions, charge design, firing times. Real mines drill against our output every week.

We have a computational-geometry specialist who owns the surface and mesh engine, and an operations-research specialist who owns solver formulations. We need the person in the middle: who decides how the domain is stored and represented, and who writes the documents that let three people build against each other's work without collisions.

What we need

- 8+ years building production software, with real ownership of systems that outlived you on a team
- Depth in storage and data modeling. You have designed the schema a product rests on — relational and spatial, plus the artifact and blob layout around it — and you can explain not just what it represents but what you deliberately refused to represent, and why
- You write unusually well, about technical things. Our process runs on design documents: a contract change ships as a document edit before it ships as code. The specifications you write are how three specialists stay composable, so this is a core engineering skill here rather than a soft one. Please send a writing sample — a design doc, RFC, architecture note, or technical post
- A strong mathematical background — geometry, linear algebra, discrete optimization.



Enough to read a CP-SAT model or a mesh operation and judge whether an abstraction is honest about what it wraps. You will not be asked to invent either
- Experience designing declarative or template-driven systems — rules engines, parametric models, configuration or dataflow systems where users compose behavior instead of writing code
- The judgment to hold an interface with a specialist more expert than you in their own field, including saying no to code that works but cannot ship

Helps, but we don't require it

- CAD, GIS, CAE, or scientific-computing background — adjacent problem shapes
- PostGIS, or any responsible spatial-data experience
- TypeScript, React, three.js. Part of this surfaces in a 3D web application
- Operations-research experience. We have a specialist for formulations. You need to read models, not write them
- Mining or blasting experience. We will teach you. Our pipeline design, phase contracts, and vocabulary are documented in unusual depth, and we budget three months to real competence
- Infrastructure ownership. A dedicated infrastructure engineer owns environments, deployment, and provisioning

Stack

Python — FastAPI, NumPy, SciPy, Shapely, trimesh, OR-Tools, SCIP. Postgres + PostGIS via SQLAlchemy and Alembic. Google Cloud Run and Cloud Run Jobs. Next.js, React, and three.js on the front end.

How we work

Design docs before code, with a hard invariant: shipped code never diverges from an accepted design doc. Three specialists, no layers between you and the mines running on your output, and unusually broad latitude over how the system is shaped.

📌 Lead Software Engineer, Systems Design (Montreal)
🏢 Watoga Technologies
📍 Montreal