Project Engineer - Process and Test Equipment

About the role

You will own the mining test equipment product line: the installed base, spares support, refurbishment and new builds. The engineering content varies job to job. A good deal of the mining work is built to customer-supplied drawings, where the value you add is in optimisation, buildability, efficient execution and tight control of engineering change. Other projects — typically the smaller and more unique ones — you will engineer and draw yourself, from proven concepts through layout, 3D modelling and detailing to a manufacturable package. Either way you will see it built on the workshop floor and delivered to the customer.

Key responsibilities

• Lead assigned projects from enquiry to delivery, reporting directly to the General Manager

• Review and interrogate customer drawings; find the errors, the buildability issues and the cost savings before we cut steel

• Raise, track and commercially close out engineering changes

• Concept development, layout, optimisation, modelling and detailing where we originate the design

• Manage third-party certification and verification through to first-pass approval

• Quote and estimate assigned work; support spares quoting

• Share the technical and quoting work on the exclusive Australian agency for NETZSCH grinding and dispersion technology — enquiries, equipment selection and liaison with the German principal

• Work directly with customers as their technical contact

• Commission equipment on the floor with trades — build, assembly, testing and proving

• Work alongside the Manufacturing Manager and shop floor — you will see what you draw get made, and learn from how it is made

About you

• Degree qualified in mechanical engineering, or equivalent demonstrated capability

• Minimum 5 years in equipment design, machine building or heavy fabrication

• Strong 3D modelling — Solidworks preferred; AutoCAD advantageous

• Comfortable preparing packages that a third-party certifier will sign

• Able to run several projects at once and keep competing requirements under control

• Comfortable working from someone else's drawings and reading them critically

• Versatile — happy to move between product areas as workload demands

• You close your own loops — you respond, follow up and report status without being chased

• Practical and hands-on — you want to be on the equipment, not just modelling it

• Commissioning and fault-finding experience on machinery or process equipment

About us

J.C.SMALE ENGINEERING has been building machines and equipment since 1962. We are a family-owned Australian manufacturer operating from Notting Hill in Melbourne's south-east, with a wholly owned facility in Malaysia. We design, build, install and support process and test equipment for the mining, clay and brick, and general industrial sectors, working directly with our customers rather than through head contractors. We are ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 certified. Our engineering team is small, experienced and long-serving, and the General Manager is a mechanical engineer — technical decisions get made quickly and by people who understand them.

What we offer

• Full ownership of a product line and its customer relationship — not a slice of someone else's project

• Direct reporting to the General Manager. No layers, no committees

• Based on site at the point of manufacture — engineering and the workshop under one roof, so you develop faster and your designs get better

• Work with world-class European process technology through the exclusive Australian agency, alongside our own equipment

• Genuine variety across process and test equipment, brick plant machinery and general industrial work — some projects repeat and build your depth, others are one-off and stretch you

• A confirmed forward order book, including multiple new equipment builds

• A stable, profitable, sixty-year-old business with room to grow the role