About Cicada Innovations

Cicada Innovations is Australia's leading deep tech incubator and network. With over 25 years developing ventures focused on the world’s most pressing problems and promising opportunities, Cicada provides incubators, support services and community networks designed to meet the unique needs of deep tech startups.

Based across NSW and Victoria, we've nurtured 500+ companies delivering innovation for Australia's economic resilience, global competitiveness and quality of life. Our goal is simple: to be the absolute best place for deep tech ventures to thrive, and we're looking for a Venture Executive - Critical Technologies to help us achieve this mission.

The role

As the Venture Executive - Critical Technologies, you will hold the strategic and operational reins of Cicada's physical science and sovereign capability engine across NSW and VIC, operating in a hybrid capacity to map and align our cohort’s cutting-edge capabilities with the Australian Government's List of Critical Technologies in the National Interest to unlock strategic procurement and non-dilutive capital.

This is a senior leadership role for someone who has walked the deep tech path, who understands the valleys of death, the capital-intensive industrialisation gap, and the art of translating breakthrough hardware, robotics, quantum, and advanced materials into sovereign-scale ventures

What you'll own

• Venture mentorship: Coach early-stage hardware, robotics, and quantum founders on complex supply chain dependencies, export controls, physical manufacturing scale-up, and international technology transfer. Be the trusted confidant and truth-teller they need.
• Ecosystem connection: Build high-velocity pathways between our cohort and leading specialized deep-tech capital, industry bodies,, research institutes, and strategic public initiatives.
• Design the playbook: Inject your domain expertise directly into Cicada's products, services, and curriculum - raising the bar for the entire critical technologies community we serve by addressing the unique scaling pain points of physical and critical technology systems.
• Venture velocity: Curate and optimise your venture book, tracking metrics like capital raised, technological or manufacturing milestones, and community penetration and collaborate actively with peer Venture Executives across the national Cicada ecosystem.

About You

The deep tech founders in Cicada's community are brilliant scientists, engineers and researchers. They don't need generic business templates - they need peers who have scaled the cliffs and survived multiple valleys of death.

To thrive as a Cicada Venture Executive, you will have:

• 10+ years of senior leadership, founding, or portfolio management experience in hardware startups, prime tech integrators, deep tech incubators, or deep-tech investment.
• A commercialisation track record navigating the hard-tech mechanics, deep-software scaling, and complex IP protection or licensing strategies of physical systems.
• Experience navigating international export regimes (e.g., ITAR/DEC) and originating strategic partnerships or technology transfer agreements with multinationals
• A natural systems thinker who actively weaves networks together, bridging capital, industry, research and policy into something greater than the sum of its parts
• The ability to move fluently between the worlds of research, investment, industry and government, and make each one legible to the others
• Genuine intellectual curiosity about breakthroughs in science and engineering, and the warmth and generosity to share your failures as freely as your successes.

Why work at Cicada?

At Cicada, you'll help ensure that nation-building technology makes it out of the lab and into the field, directly building Australia’s sovereign resilience, climate transition, and industrial systems. You'll work alongside a high-performing peer executive team, contribute to a 25-year legacy, and play a direct role in shaping Australia's deep tech future. This is where extraordinary people come to do their best work.

If this sounds like you, we'd love to hear from you.

Apply here: https://wkf.ms/4fqlio2