AI integration in Perth
Western Australia's energy and resources assets come with decades of engineering documents: drawings, procedures, maintenance histories, inspection reports and design changes, many of them scanned and some older than the people who now need them. As older facilities are modified, extended or decommissioned, engineers spend days finding the one document that says what was actually built.
We build AI features that search that archive by meaning, return answers with the document and page they came from, and flag when two documents disagree. Engineers make every decision, and access follows the permissions you already have, so each person finds only what they could already open. On FM360 we run a weekly summary written by Claude, and the rule we kept applies here too: every claim must point to its source.
Perth runs mines it cannot see. Rio Tinto controls trains, trucks and drills in the Pilbara from its operations centre in Perth, BHP runs much of its Western Australian iron ore logistics from a remote operations centre in the city, and Woodside, Fortescue and Chevron Australia keep their head offices here. Around them sits a large sector of engineering consultancies, contractors and mining equipment, technology and services firms. Most of the software work in the city exists to serve that industry, and it comes with that industry's habits: safety first, careful change control and very little tolerance for downtime.
The line that matters is between operational technology and everything else. Control systems, autonomous haulage and plant automation belong to specialists. The opportunity for outside engineers is on the business side of that line: maintenance and shutdown planning, historian data read out for analysis, contractor and workforce systems for a fly-in fly-out workforce, reporting, and the internal tools that stitch them together. Energy and utility businesses need the same kind of work, and beyond resources the state has its own buyers, from agencies and universities in the city to the wineries of Margaret River selling across the continent.
Hiring is shaped by the resources sector, which competes hard for experienced engineers and can pay for them. Indeed puts the average base salary for a software engineer in Perth at A$100,253, from 59 reported salaries, and a consultancy or scale-up bidding against a mining major for the same person often waits a long time. That is where we fit: senior engineers on a defined piece of work within days, with the code in your repositories from the first commit.
Our four hours of daily overlap land in your afternoon, moved to suit your team. Perth is the closest Australian capital to India's time zone, and neither Western Australia nor India uses daylight saving, so the window sits at the same point in your day all year. Your morning is for your own team and the site calls; the afternoon is for stand-ups, reviews and decisions with the engineer who writes your code.
We are the right fit for defined work on the business side of the operation: data, reporting, maintenance and workforce tools, and contractor systems. Senior engineers start within days, the first piece is a fixed-price two weeks, and we can carry the roadmap through the months before your own hire starts. Agencies can put the work under their own name.
Four ways this arrives.
A prompt that behaved on twenty hand-picked inputs meets ten thousand real ones. We build the evaluation set from your actual traffic first, so a change can be judged rather than argued about.
Usually a large context sent on every call, or a big model doing a job a small one can do. We measure where the tokens go before recommending anything.
Logging that captures the prompt, the retrieved context, the model version and the output, so a support question has an answer that is not a guess.
A fallback path, a timeout that is shorter than your user’s patience, and a degraded mode that is honest about being degraded.
A weekly maintenance pulse where Claude writes only the prose, checked against a JSON schema and a whitelist of numbers, with a template that takes over when the model fails.
Read the write-up →Asked by Perth teams.
How do you work with teams in Perth?+
We are in Bengaluru, and four hours of every working day overlap with your afternoon, moved to suit your team. Perth is the closest Australian capital to India's time, and neither side changes its clocks, so the window stays put all year. Stand-ups, code reviews and design calls happen live in it. We work in your tools, whether that is Slack, GitHub or Linear, and every call is with the engineer who writes the code.
Do you build for mining and energy companies?+
Yes, on the business side of the operation. We build pipelines that read historian data out for analysis, maintenance and shutdown planning tools, contractor management platforms, apps that put a FIFO worker's roster, flights and documents in one place, and dense planning views for remote operations teams. We integrate with the maintenance, HR and procurement systems you already run, and start with the problem that costs you most on site.
How does your rate compare to hiring in Perth?+
Indeed puts the average base salary for a software engineer in Perth at around A$100,000, and the resources sector often pays more to win experienced people. Our published rate is $35/hour with a $5,000 minimum, or $5,400 a month for one embedded engineer. There is no recruiting time and no employment overhead, and work can start within days. The first piece is a fixed-price two-week engagement at $2,800, so you judge us on what ships.
What do the first two weeks look like?+
You share the context, with an NDA signed before anything specific. Within two days you are on a 30-minute call with the engineer who would do the work, and within a week you have a written plan. Then comes a fixed-price two-week piece for $2,800: one real thing, such as a maintenance report, a contractor portal screen or a data feed, built in your repositories and reviewed with you in your afternoons.
Will you tell us if we do not need a model?+
Yes, and it happens often. Several requests we have taken turned out to be a search problem, a rules engine, or a form with better defaults. We would rather say that in week one than bill for a year of prompt tuning.
Whose API keys?+
Yours, in your accounts, with the spend visible to you. We never proxy your traffic through infrastructure we control.
What about our data going to a provider?+
We map exactly what leaves your systems and where it lands before anything is wired up. Where that is not acceptable, self-hosted open-weight models on your own hardware are a real option and we will price both.
Do you fine-tune?+
Rarely, and not as a first move. Retrieval and prompt structure fix most of what people bring to us as a fine-tuning problem, at a fraction of the cost and with none of the retraining treadmill.