Cochlear’s mission is to help people hear and be heard. As the global leader in implantable hearing solutions, Cochlear is dedicated to helping people with moderate to profound hearing loss experience a world full of sound. We aim to transform the way people understand and treat hearing loss and innovate to connect people with future technologies. Our employees tell us that the number one reason they enjoy working for Cochlear is the opportunity to make a difference to people’s lives. Learn and grow with us as we tackle the most complex challenges in helping more people to experience a lifetime of hearing.
The Opportunity
This is your opportunity to shape the future of hearing technology while leaving a lasting legacy on products that transform lives across the globe. As Director of Sound Processors Hardware Development, you'll drive the technical vision for Cochlear's sound processor portfolio, making strategic decisions that directly impact how more than 650,000 recipients experience sound and connection in their daily lives.
We are seeking a Director Sound Processors Hardware Development, reporting to the Vice President Sound Processor Systems Development to be based in our Cochlear Headquarters in Sydney, Australia.
In this pivotal and highly visible role, you will set the technical vision for Cochlear's sound processor hardware roadmap and influence the next generation of implantable hearing technology. You'll lead and grow high-performing global engineering teams, fostering excellence across multiple hardware disciplines while driving innovation and platform-based development.
By embedding Product Family Engineering principles, you'll enable scalable, sustainable product evolution that accelerates time-to-market and maximizes design reuse.
Your leadership will ensure cohesive collaboration across R&D, Systems Architecture, Program Management, and Global Delivery teams, aligning strategy and architecture to deliver best-in-class product execution. Through your focus on advancing capability, quality, and delivery performance, you'll strengthen Cochlear's engineering leadership for the long term.
This is a rare opportunity to combine strategic influence, technology leadership, and mission-driven impact—creating products that profoundly enhance quality of life.
Responsibilities include
Strategic Technical Leadership: Set the engineering direction for sound processor hardware development, contribute to R&D vision, provide input to the PSP process, and drive collaborative activities across teams to ensure alignment of strategic goals, architectures, and priorities
Delivery Excellence: Lead teams to develop product hardware that exceeds customer expectations, ensure on-time and on-budget project delivery, manage resource allocation, mentor design engineers, and drive proactive sustaining activities and CAPA resolution
People Leadership: Build a leadership team to deliver hardware design excellence, support Hardware Development guilds across R&D verticals, drive engagement through coaching and professional development, and develop 3-year capability plans and 5-quarter forecasts
Innovation & Process Improvement: Create a culture of innovation, take strategic ownership for adoption of best practices and tools, define and communicate vision for project execution across horizons, and champion improvements in R&D processes while ensuring high-quality, timely product delivery
About You. As we grow our operations, we are looking for people who share our passion delivering safe, effective, and high-quality hearing solutions. To add value to Cochlear in this role, you'll be able to demonstrate the following skills and experience:
Technical Foundation
You bring 5-10+ years of technical team leadership experience in the Medical Device industry, with proven success managing managers and partnering with project managers to deliver outcomes through others. Your expert understanding of hardware design for medical devices is complemented by demonstrated ability to guide teams in delivering customer-centric solutions using emerging technology advances. You communicate complex technical concepts clearly, with excellent technical English and strong ability to articulate vision, strategy, progress, and risks to diverse stakeholders across all organizational levels.
Leadership Excellence
Your leadership style inspires action and builds capability. You have demonstrated capacity to lead global and multifunctional teams through influence, motivating everyone from CEO to engineers around a shared vision. You're passionate about growing talent and building succession pipelines that create lasting organizational capability. You embrace opportunities with urgency, enthusiasm, and energy, driving execution and delivery of quality outcomes while ensuring accountability at all levels.
Strategic & Commercial Mindset
You combine strategic vision with pragmatic execution. Your understanding of long-term product planning, strategy processes, and customer needs enables you to set direction confidently. You're a decisive decision-maker who pushes boundaries and challenges the status quo while remaining agile enough to balance speed with quality. When faced with complexity and ambiguity, you make sound commercial trade-offs and decisions, applying a broad global perspective and demonstrating effective influence across complex organizational networks.
Personal Leadership
You demonstrate exceptional self-awareness and agility, actively seeking and learning from feedback. You operate effectively in ambiguity and show remarkable resilience under pressure, maintaining clarity and composure when leading through change.
What Would Make You Stand Out
Experience in consumer product development within the medical device industry would give you valuable insight into user-centered design at scale.
An MBA or management qualifications would complement your technical foundation with strategic business frameworks. We'd be particularly excited to see demonstrated experience in platform development, standard interfaces, product family engineering, and design reuse—capabilities that are central to how we're evolving our development approach.
Finally, a proven track record of fostering cultures of confidence, challenge, and experimentation, where you've successfully delivered breakthrough innovations to customers in compressed timelines, would immediately set you apart.
Why this role is for you?
You'll build and inspire high-performing global teams, developing the next generation of technical leaders through meaningful coaching, mentorship, and thoughtful succession planning that creates lasting capability across the organization.
Working at the cutting edge of medical device innovation, you'll champion platform thinking and Product Family Engineering principles in an environment that values continuous improvement and breakthrough thinking.
You'll collaborate with world-class clinical researchers, technical experts, and passionate teams across our global sites, all united by a singular mission: helping people hear and be heard.
This role offers the rare combination of strategic influence, people leadership, technical innovation, and mission-driven work that defines truly exceptional career opportunities in the medical device industry.
If you feel that you have the skills and experience to be successful in this role and take on new challenges to build your career with Cochlear, please start your application by clicking the apply button below.
#CochlearCareers
How we recognise your contribution
At Cochlear we value and welcome the unique contributions, perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds of our employees and aim to build a culture that celebrates and leverages these differences, creating a sense of belonging and enabling our people to realise their full potential. Through our internal programs and employee benefits, we aim to create an environment where our people will feel value and supported. Whether your focus is on continuous learning, professional development or simply finding an environment which enables you to thrive whilst balancing family or personal life commitments, then we have several programs in place to support you.
For more information about Life at Cochlear, visit www.cochlearcareers.com