Mechatronics Engineer — Automation & Robotics

About the role

This is two jobs in one seat. Half is our own system — GrowData runs on more than 300 growers' properties with pump sheds, valve nodes, load cells weighing fruit as it comes off the harvester, and long-range wireless networks strung across blocks with no mains power and no phone coverage. You will build it, commission it and be the reason it keeps running. That now includes autonomous tractors working almond blocks, through our partnership with Agtonomy. The other half is industrial — robotics cells, packaging lines and conveyor systems. You will be based in Mildura and you will be in the field. This is not a job you do from a desk with occasional site visits.

Key responsibilities

• Develop, modify and commission PLC and HMI code across a mixed installed base including Omron, Siemens, Allen-Bradley and Schneider

• Integrate industrial robots into handling, inspection and packaging duty for industrial clients and verify the safety interlocks before anything runs

• Configure and commission variable speed drives on pump and conveyor duty

• Design, deploy and fault-find long-range wireless field networks

• Work alongside Agtonomy's engineers on autonomous tractor deployments — implement commissioning, interlock verification, field trials, and account for what actually happened

• Support GrowData Track through harvest: load cell calibration and yield measurement

• Run root cause analysis on recurring faults and close them out at the source

• Hold commissioning discipline — test protocols executed and recorded, change control respected, handover packs a service tech can actually use

• Be the engineer the farm manager or the plant manager rings

About you

• A bachelor's degree in mechatronic engineering, or a mechanical or electrical engineering degree with mechatronics practice you can demonstrate

• At least three years hands-on industrial automation experience in a production environment where downtime costs real money

• PLC development across at least three vendor platforms, with genuine fluency in Structured Text and Ladder Logic, and working use of SFC and FBD

• Industrial robot integration across more than one brand, in handling, inspection or packaging duty

• Machine vision you have commissioned yourself — set up, taught, tuned and handed over

• Variable speed drive configuration and commissioning

• Commissioning and validation discipline: executing test protocols, handling deviations, and documenting to a standard that would survive an audit

• A current driver's licence and a real willingness to spend your week in a ute

• The right to work in Australia, or eligibility for us to sponsor you

• You live in Mildura, or you are moving there

About us

Inform Ag builds monitoring, control and automation systems for enterprise-scale irrigated horticulture — almonds, citrus, vines and macadamias. Twenty-five years of industrial automation engineering, brought into agriculture. We design, build, install, commission and support our own systems. More than 300 growers run GrowData, across around 200,000 hectares in Australia, New Zealand and the United States.

Benefits

• $80,000 per annum plus superannuation

• Two very different bodies of work in one role — our own product across enterprise horticulture, and industrial robotics and packaging work outside it

• Real ownership — you commission it, you sign it off, you get the call when it matters

• A named supervisor, a scorecard so you know what winning looks like, and structured feedback against it

• The engineering depth of a business that has done industrial automation for twenty-five years and is now applying it to agriculture