Imagine having the power to stress-test an entire power grid against a hurricane or thunderstorm before the clouds even gather. That is the reality we are creating at Neara.
We use advanced machine learning to create engineering-grade, physics enabled digital twins of electricity grids across four continents, this helps asset owners understand their biggest challenges and bring the most viable solutions to life across millions of kilometres of infrastructure.
By simulating extreme weather and structural stress at a network-wide scale, we empower the world’s largest utilities to pinpoint risks, optimise investments and build a more resilient global energy future.
Our team is a collection of brilliant minds who are fanatical about making a tangible difference in the real world, utilising AI and machine learning to accelerate everything from data classification to complex scenario analysis. We have built a special culture where innovation thrives because everyone owns the mission and we need smart, creative people to help us scale this impact to every corner of the globe.
Utilities are contending with a rapidly shifting energy mix and a surge in connection requests, from renewable generation to hyperscale data centre campuses. Together, these pressures are testing the long-term reliability and resilience of critical infrastructure networks. Until now, utilities have had to manage these challenges by making conservative assumptions drawn from siloed data.
Neara acquired Zepben to solve this problem. By combining electrical, physical and risk modelling, we’ve created the world’s first integrated digital twin, giving utilities a single model in which to assess physical and electrical constraints together. The result is faster connections, more clean energy on the grid, real progress towards decarbonisation targets and downward pressure on power prices.
As Director, Grid Connections, you will lead the integration and development of this capability and create Neara’s Grid Connections solution, extending our impact beyond utilities to the communities and customers they serve. This is a rare opportunity to use two powerful platforms in Neara and Zepben to create an entirely new category of software that helps to meaningfully accelerate the energy transition.
Your key responsibility is to lead the delivery of the Self-Service Grid Connection Toolkit project (the Project), which was awarded to Zepben under the Australian Government’s Grid Enhancing Technology (GET) Grant. Successfully delivering the Project will validate product-market fit and champion the Neara connection solution, creating demand amongst Australian utilities, governments and government agencies seeking faster, more transparent resolutions for connection enquiries.
The Director, Grid Connections, is responsible for driving the overall success of the Project. You will provide hands-on commercial, product, delivery and customer leadership, manage the Customer Success engineers assigned to the Project, and ensure engineering receives timely requirements, customer feedback and product input.
A Delivery Lead (Project Manager) will report to the Director, Grid Connections, and manage the day-to-day timeline and deployment of the Project, holding the engineering team accountable for agreed commitments, and producing all project reporting. Key issues and strategic decisions will be escalated to the Director, Grid Connections.
Neara is the first physics-enabled digital twin that combines engineering-grade analysis at the individual asset level with network-wide scale. It goes beyond visualization, capturing real-world spatial relationships — and how they change in any condition — that are essential to answering any ‘what-if’ question about your network:
• Between assets and their surroundings — in a >50 mph SW wind scenario, where will assets breach safe clearance thresholds?
• Between assets themselves — if one pole fails, which other ones will go with it?
• Across layers of workflows — if a tower gets moved inland, how will vegetation encroachment zones shift?
It applies the same physics-verified rigor used in engineering design to the full set of critical infrastructure challenges — from asset management and wildfire mitigation to resiliency and reliability, and design and construction. It connects the granular perspective engineers need to maintain a structurally sound, safe system with the network-wide view leaders need to improve reliability and efficiency. With Neara, daily realities upgrade from:
• Chasing risks by problem area to prioritizing context-agnostic risks by total network impact
• Costly and inefficient manual processes to precise, automated workflows
• Messy, anecdotal, project justification to easy-to-audit business cases that hold up from the field to the boardroom and courtroom
Every analysis, from a single pole’s loading to a proposed new transmission route, is grounded in the same structural ground truth so infrastructure owners can prioritize and validate network investment to maximize impact and capital efficiency in every context on every timescale.
Trusted by global utilities including Southern California Edison, CenterPoint Energy, HEDNO, and ESB, Neara has modeled millions of assets across four continents — reducing key processes from years to hours, restoring service >3× faster, and saving tens of millions in annual costs.
