Product Manager - Assignment Engine & Optimisation

About Us

Fortescue is both a proud West Australian company and a global green solutions business. We are recognised for our culture, innovation and industry-leading development of infrastructure, mining assets and green energy initiatives.

Our Opportunity

Work Location: Perth Office 

Roster: Monday to Friday

The Product Manager – Assignment Engine & Optimisation is accountable for the vision, strategy, and outcomes of this capability. The role defines the roadmap and OKRs for decision science and reporting, ensuring the Assignment Engine delivers measurable business value in the form of maximised tonnes per hour and improved operational efficiency.

Acting as the first point of validation for strategic bets, the Product Manager partners closely with operations, data science, and engineering to ensure that customer problems are validated (valuable, usable, feasible, viable) and translated into prioritised product outcomes.

This role ensures the Assignment Engine remains reliable, scalable, and user-focused, supporting both staffed and autonomous mine control systems, while providing guidance to the Product Owner and squad that execute delivery.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and maintain the product vision and roadmap for Assignment Engine & Optimisation, ensuring alignment with corporate strategy and stream OKRs
• Balance optimisation and operational goals to maximise throughput (e.g., tonnes per hour) while maintaining operational efficiency
• Prioritise strategic bets using structured frameworks (outcome vs. effort, risk vs. reward) to guide investment decisions
• Engage stakeholders across functions (operations, commercial, engineering, strategy) to validate problems, secure alignment, and drive measurable outcomes
• Act as the voice of the customer, ensuring operational perspectives (mine controllers, planners, engineers) inform leadership discussions and product direction
• Lead continuous discovery and validation, ensuring backlog items are valuable, usable, feasible, and aligned with compliance and safety standards
• Collaborate with engineers, data scientists, and architects to validate feasibility and scalability of optimisation models
• Oversee delivery of product increments, ensuring they align with roadmap outcomes, OKRs, and release readiness standards
• Track and analyse KPIs (assignment accuracy, cycle time efficiency, fleet throughput), feeding insights back into discovery and continuous improvement
• Promote incremental value delivery, defining MVP boundaries that balance speed, safety, quality, and long-term maintainability.

Qualifications and Experience

• 5+ years’ experience in product management or ownership within complex software/hardware environments, ideally in mining or industrial domains
• Proven ability to lead product strategy, roadmaps, and outcomes for decision science, optimisation, or fleet management solutions
• Track record of delivering measurable business outcomes through collaboration with cross-functional teams across engineering, data science, and operations
• Direct engagement with operational stakeholders (e.g., mining control, dispatch, mine planning) to validate needs and outcomes
• Strong capability in defining product vision, OKRs, and roadmaps, balancing optimisation ambitions with immediate operational demands
• Exceptional analytical and problem-solving skills, with conceptual thinking applied to optimisation and decision-making
• Skilled communicator and stakeholder manager, adept at bridging between technical teams (data scientists, engineers) and operational users (mine controllers)
• Deep understanding of assignment and dispatch optimisation principles, with proven impact on fleet efficiency and throughput
• Working knowledge of data science, ML, and optimisation modelling, with ability to translate technical potential into tangible business value
• Awareness of mining production principles, KPIs, system architecture, data integration, and regulatory frameworks (including OHS and Mines Regulations).

Our Commitment

Fortescue is deeply committed to providing a safe culture that builds respect, fosters inclusiveness, and values diversity. We celebrate individual strengths and team members from all backgrounds are encouraged to bring their whole selves to work. Our global workforce drives and promotes an inclusive culture, both within our organisation and throughout the communities we interact with across the world. Diverse backgrounds include First Nations Peoples, people with differing abilities, LGBTIQ+ community, gender, neurodiverse, cultural diversity, all age groups, and those with an intersectional or multiple diverse characteristics. We encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply.

https://fortescue.com/careers 

Internal Candidates / Current Contractors please apply via Success Factors Careers Portal. For further information on how to apply please visit the Fortescue Hub. 

Fortescue reserves the right to close applications early should a suitable pool of candidates be identified. Fortescue will never contact you to ask for payment of any kind, whether directly or through a third party.