Autonomous Operations Process Engineer

Ornata; Richmond (VA); On-site; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

Ornata is building a remote operations platform for agriculture, seeking an Autonomous Operations Process Engineer to define how remote machinery operations are performed. You will translate live experience into procedures and documentation, ensuring every operator action is governed by clear processes.

Role spans hands-on field operations, SOP development, and collaboration with engineering to improve safety, reliability, and scalability of the platform.

Qualifications

• Experience turning real-world operations into repeatable procedures.
• Experience writing SOPs, work instructions, or training material.
• Background in control rooms, operations centers, or automation environments.

Responsibilities

• Operate Ornata-enabled machinery remotely as part of the operations team.
• Turn live operational experience into workflows, clear SOPs, operator guides, checklists, decision trees, and escalation procedures.
• Own the documentation update cycle for remote operations procedures.
• Review incidents, near misses, operator feedback, customer feedback, and engineering changes to identify required process updates.
• Ensure procedures are practical, usable, and followed by operators in real-world conditions.
• Help define handover processes, communication protocols, stop/go criteria, authority limits, and operational logging requirements.
• Identify where operator ambiguity exists and design process improvements to remove it.
• Work with the engineering team to define product and platform features that improve operational structure, consistency, and safety.
• Support operator onboarding and training as Ornata grows the remote operations team.
• Build the foundations for a scalable operating system for autonomous and remotely operated farm machinery.

Skills

Process engineering

SOP writing

Technical writing

Operations

Education

Engineering degree

Tools

Excel

Confluence

Notion

Job description

About Ornata

Ornata is building the remote operations platform for agriculture.

We help farms operate machinery without a human in the cab, using the equipment they already own. Our service combines retrofit autonomy hardware, remote operators, AI, and operational systems to unlock the benefits of autonomy for every farm.

We are working with some of Australia’s leading broadacre farming businesses and are now building the operational foundations required to scale safely, reliably, and repeatably.

About the role

We are looking for an Autonomous Operations Process Engineer to help define how remote machinery operations are performed at Ornata.

This is a hands-on operations engineering role. You will spend significant time working directly in remote operations, learning how our systems behave in the real world, then turning that experience into clear procedures, checklists, decision trees, training material, and platform requirements.

The objective is simple but important: there should be no action taken by a remote operator that is not defined in an operating process.

You will be responsible for building the process layer that allows Ornata to scale from a small expert team into a repeatable, auditable, high-quality remote operations service.

Responsibilities

• Operate Ornata-enabled machinery remotely as part of the operations team.
• Turn live operational experience into workflows, clear SOPs, operator guides, checklists, decision trees, and escalation procedures.
• Own the documentation update cycle for remote operations procedures.
• Review incidents, near misses, operator feedback, customer feedback, and engineering changes to identify required process updates.
• Ensure procedures are practical, usable, and followed by operators in real-world conditions.
• Help define handover processes, communication protocols, stop/go criteria, authority limits, and operational logging requirements.
• Identify where operator ambiguity exists and design process improvements to remove it.
• Work with the engineering team to define product and platform features that improve operational structure, consistency, and safety.
• Support operator onboarding and training as Ornata grows the remote operations team.
• Build the foundations for a scalable operating system for autonomous and remotely operated farm machinery.

This role is unusual. We do not expect to find someone who has done exactly this before.

We are looking for someone who is smart, practical, clear-thinking, and willing to get close to the operation. You may come from process engineering, manufacturing engineering, industrial engineering, systems engineering, field engineering, automation, robotics, control-room operations, or another technical operations environment.

You will likely be a good fit if you:

• Like turning messy real-world work into clear, repeatable systems.
• Are comfortable operating close to machinery, technology, and live customer environments.
• Can write clearly and precisely.
• Think naturally in terms of procedures, decision points, exceptions, risks, and feedback loops.
• Have strong attention to detail without becoming bureaucratic.
• Are comfortable working in an early-stage company where the right answer often needs to be discovered, not inherited.
• Can move between hands-on operations and structured documentation.
• Are interested in autonomy, agriculture, robotics, industrial systems, or remote operations.
• Want to build the operating model for a new category of work

Useful experience

Any of the following would be helpful, but none are strict requirements:

• Process engineering, manufacturing engineering, industrial engineering, or systems engineering.
• Experience writing SOPs, work instructions, operating procedures, or training material.
• Experience in a control room, operations centre, field operations, commissioning, automation, robotics, mining, aviation, energy, logistics, or industrial environment.
• Mechanical, mechatronics, electrical, aerospace, software, or industrial engineering background.
• Experience with incident review, root cause analysis, continuous improvement, or quality systems.
• Familiarity with agricultural machinery or broadacre farming.

• Be part of an early-stage team where your work will directly shape how the company scales.
• Open landscape to take on responsibility to develop the role within the business.
• Quick-paced career growth for the tenacious go-getters
• Work across operations, product, engineering, safety, and customer delivery.
• Be part of an inner city Melbourne-based team building technology for one of Australia’s most important industries.

What success looks like

In this role, success means Ornata’s remote operations become more repeatable, structured, robust and easier to scale.

Over time, you will help build an operating system where routine operator actions are covered by clear procedures, new operators can be trained consistently, operational deviations are logged and reviewed, incidents and edge cases lead to process or product improvements, and customers experience a reliable and professional service as Ornata scales.

Application question suggestion

We are especially interested in hearing about times where you have taken a complex real-world process and made it clearer, safer, more repeatable, or easier to scale.