Engineering Project Coordinator in Melbourne

The Design Technology Company – North Melbourne VIC DTCo is a Melbourne-based mechanical engineering and CAD design consultancy. Our tagline is "Bringing order to complexity", and that is what we do for clients in defence, manufacturing, food and healthcare. Our clients include Navantia, BAE Systems, Supacat, Planet Innovation and Cablex. We are defence cleared and work in Inventor, SOLIDWORKS, CATIA, NX and ShipConstructor, either remotely in the client's portal or onsite Australia-wide. We are a team of just under 30 including designers and engineers with a work forecast and growth plan to rapidly expand in the coming 12 months.

The opportunity

This is a new role and the engine room of our project delivery. You will make sure every job we take on is quoted correctly, staffed properly, kept inside its scope and delivered on time and on budget. You will work closely with our engineering team so they have what they need to hit their targets, and you will report directly to the owners. In addition, you will get first-hand experience with customers and work alongside our BDM to ensure we capture the scope and any questions early to ensure there are minimal delays once work has commenced. Defence is our largest sector, so a defence background is strongly preferred. We see this role growing into a true Project Manager position, and we will support the right person to gain the qualifications and experience to get there.

What you'll do

• Track every active project against its schedule and milestones, and flag risks early enough to do something about them.
• Run regular project check-ins with engineering and keep the owners and clients informed on progress.
• Chase down the inputs, client data, approvals and decisions our engineers need so work is never stalled waiting on information.
• Work with our BDM on quoting: get the scope clear with the client up front, and make sure hours, assumptions and exclusions match it before the quote goes out.
• Feed actual hours from completed jobs back into future quotes so our estimating gets sharper over time.
• Spot scope creep as it happens, document it, and make sure out-of-scope work is raised as a variation rather than absorbed.
• Manage staff allocations across jobs so the right people are on the right projects and nobody is over- or under-loaded.
• Track timesheets, hours used and budget burn on every project, and act when a job starts drifting from its estimate.
• Produce simple weekly and monthly reporting on delivery, utilisation, hours against budget and upcoming capacity.

What we are looking for

Essential

• 2–5 years in project coordination, project engineering or project administration, ideally in engineering, design, manufacturing or defence.
• A technical enough grounding to read a scope of work and question whether a quote matches it.
• Experience tracking hours, budgets and schedules, and managing resource allocation across multiple concurrent jobs.
• An approachable personality to work with our engineering team for an outcome.
• Highly organised, with strong attention to detail and the confidence to push back on scope creep, with clients and with our own team.
• Australian citizenship (required for our defence work) and able to obtain and hold a Baseline security clearance.

Desirable

• Strongly preferred: a defence background, whether with a prime, an SME supplier, the ADF or Defence itself, and familiarity with DISP or defence project requirements.
• An engineering, drafting or technical qualification.
• Familiarity with CAD and engineering design workflows (Inventor, SOLIDWORKS, CATIA, NX or ShipConstructor).
• A project management qualification or working towards one is a clear bonus (CAPM, PRINCE2 Foundation or similar).

What we offer

• $90,000–$100,000 base plus superannuation, with performance bonuses linked to delivery KPIs (on-target earnings $110,000–$120,000).
• Direct reporting to the owners, with real influence over how the business runs.
• Hybrid working (2 days from home).
• Varied, technically interesting work across defence, manufacturing, food and healthcare.
• A clear path to Project Manager: DTCo will fund a project management qualification (such as CAPM or PRINCE2), with a formal 12-month review of your role and package.
• A North Melbourne office close to public transport.