Grove Group · Pakenham VIC. Build internal tools, workflows and technical infrastructure across estimating, design, procurement, production, resource planning and project delivery. Working with Stephen Grove and senior management to convert business objectives into shipped systems.
The ad targets a "graduate, early-career developer or systems-minded builder" — but the work it covers (build internal AI/automation infrastructure across estimating, design, procurement, production, resource planning and project delivery, from the ground up, scalable, documented) is a senior IC build job. I am applying on the assumption that Grove is open to a 27-year IC builder for it.
If that conversation is open, the dashboard below sets out the case. If the role has to land at graduate calibration, no positioning saves it — and I would rather know that early than waste your time.
Estimating, design, procurement, production, resource planning, project delivery. Verbatim. The DOT planning architecture I built solo at Saputo covered the same end-to-end span — for a privately operated business with multiple divisions, family-influenced governance, and a commitment to local manufacturing. The pattern transfers because the operating problem is the same shape.
Modular building delivery is BOM complexity, variant management, takt scheduling, supplier coordination, and disciplined exception handling — applied to schools and kindergartens instead of workwear and uniforms. Pacific Brands Workwear Group taught me this exact pattern, at scale, with CEO sign-off governance. Grove's 50+ school deliveries per year and 40% market share in the VSBA program is the volume profile where the methodology demonstrates its value.
I deliberately stepped down from group-level management at Pacific Brands to IC builder roles. I do my best work where decisions are quick, the founder is in the building, and the work is the artefact rather than the slide deck. From the outside Grove reads as exactly that environment. If I am wrong about the cultural read, that is something to surface in the first conversation.
Layers 5–7 of the DOT architecture and the KIM pegging engine were built with Anthropic's Claude as engineering partner from 2024 — RAG, agentic exception handling, prompt-chained reconciliation. Not toy projects: enterprise-scale build patterns at the limits of what one person + AI can architect. Grove's tools list (OpenAI, Claude, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Replit, Retool, Make, Zapier) is a description of how this work happens. I am two years into it on real work.
Built solo as the single planning systems builder at Workwear Group level — three management tiers above where I sit today. Harvested data from six divisional ERPs, auto-generated supplier orders, produced branded dashboards per division and S&OP decks for the three divisional CEOs with mandatory sign-off governance.
The relevant point for Grove: this is the same pattern. Group-level builder, multiple operating divisions, repeatable manufacturing problem, family-influenced governance, demanding executives. I have done this exact job before.
Solo build of the Demand Operations Tower over nine years. Seven integrated layers — and the layer list maps verbatim onto Grove's role description: estimating, design (planning), procurement, production, resource planning, project delivery (rollout to operations).
Layers 5–7 (the most recent) were built with Anthropic's Claude as a genuine engineering partner — full architectural collaboration. The methodology Grove's role description names is the methodology that built these layers.