BizOps Associate

Aquila; Sydney; On-site; AUD 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

Aquila is building its operations team in Sydney and seeks a generalist Operations hire who will report to the Head of Operations. The role is to flex across the business needs, tackling export control, demonstration logistics, and readiness testing as priority areas.

You will work hands-on with engineers and field teams, owning processes as the company scales. The position requires curiosity, adaptability, and a bias to action, with results-oriented problem solving at the core.

Qualifications

• Willingness to operate across multiple domains and adapt to the business needs.
• Comfortable embedded with engineers and technical teams.
• Hands-on problem solver who can work on logistics, compliance, and testing.

Responsibilities

• Coordinate export control and compliance activities.
• Plan and run demonstration logistics and field demos.
• Improve testing readiness and quality gates for deployments.
• Tackle supply chain and vendor issues as they arise.

Skills

Generalist operations

Hands-on mindset

Curiosity

Engineer collaboration

Problem solving

Job description

This is one of the first hires onto the operations team being built by Aquila's Head of Operations. You'll report directly to them, and be one of the first people they bring in as they stand the function up.

This is not a single-function ops job. It's a generalist operations seat: the role will flex to whatever the business needs most at a given time, and your Head of Operations will point you at it.

Right now that includes export control, demonstration logistics, and marketing our milestones. In three months it might mean tightening our outdoor laser testing and quality-gate process before a system leaves the lab. In six, it might be a completely different problem no one has spotted yet. You'll help find those problems as much as fix the ones already known about.

What You Might Own:

Your first few months will likely centre on the areas below - not because the role is limited to them, but because they're the sharpest problems on the table today:

• Export control and compliance: Develop a repeatable strategy to ship our tech overseas. We have global customers waiting in line for our product launch and we want to ship it as soon as it’s ready. This means getting into the nitty gritty: DSGL/EAR documentation, coordinating with freight forwarders, and keeping international shipments compliant as we move hardware between Australia, the US, Germany, and Singapore.
• Demonstration logistics: Plan and run the operational side of field demos (Fort Hood in November, German Bundeswehr trials, and whatever comes next) - equipment manifests, shipping, site prep, teardown.
• Tech testing and readiness: Help tighten pre-deployment checklists and quality gates so systems leaving the lab are consistently tested and documented. Outdoor testing of our system requires significant engineering time for planning, setup, takedown, and coordination. You’ll be tapped to make this process more efficient.

Beyond that, expect the job to move. Some things you might pick up as they surface:

• Supply chain and vendor problems that are quietly costing the engineering team time
• Whatever specific gap opens up as we scale toward the 2028 commercial deployment target
• A recurring operational headache nobody has had the bandwidth to fix properly

The common thread isn't a job function - it's to solve the most urgent problems, and the problems that are not seemingly urgent, but highly impactful. Spotting those before they surface is as much the job as executing on the ones we already know about.

What You'll Bring:

• You're relentlessly curious. You ask better questions than most people in the room, and that's how you learn fast from people who know more than you about their own domain.
• You're comfortable working with engineers - genuinely, not just tolerantly. You'll spend most of your time embedded with a highly technical team. You don't need to be the deepest technical expert, but you need to want to be part of their team, not adjacent to it.
• You love solving problems for other people. This role gets deployed out to wherever the company needs it. If "that's not my job" is a sentence you reach for, this isn't the role.
• You default to hands-on. You'd rather spend a week in a warehouse or on a shipping dock sorting something out than write a memo about it.
• You have no ego about scope. The job might be export paperwork one month and a testing process the next. Both matter equally.