Senior Systems Engineer (ASR - Hardware/OnPrem)

About Auror

At Auror, we’re empowering the retail industry to tackle theft and Organised Retail Crime, a $150 Billion problem globally. It’s high volume crime that’s increasingly organised in nature and is putting people, retailers, and communities at risk every day.

Founded in New Zealand 13 years ago, we’re working with some of the best and largest retailers in the world across the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the UK.

Auror is connecting people and intelligence to reduce crime. We’re using technology for good.

In partnership with our leading retail partners, we need people with the passion, determination, and innovation required to overcome one of the world's largest problems. If you’re looking to make a difference with and for the people dedicated to stopping crime, for good, then we want you on our team.

We're also embracing the potential of AI to supercharge our impact—whether that's enhancing the way we detect trends, support our customers, or improve internal workflows. As a company, we're committed to responsibly incorporating AI into how we work and what we build, and we encourage all Aurors to be curious about how AI can elevate their work, regardless of role or function.

The Role

This is a brand new role at Auror, which means you’ll have real scope to shape it. Auror’s Subject Recognition (ASR) technology runs across a global edge estate, on-camera and on-server, in thousands of retail stores around the world.

Your role will be to help Auror own and evolve this edge capability. This includes making the estate observable, reliable, upgradeable and supportable at scale, while also developing new detection, recognition and AI capabilities as the technology evolves. You’ll help our support teams and customers’ Security Operations Centre (SOC) and IT teams identify and respond to issues before customers notice them, and give Auror the evidence needed to confidently improve the underlying models and functionality.

This brings a unique set of systems challenges, from debugging across device, container, host and network boundaries, to building the observability and evaluation tooling that tells us whether what we have deployed is working as intended in a remote environment Auror doesn’t control. You’ll also navigate trade-offs such as latency, detection accuracy and compute constraints, and contribute to ASR capabilities that may span both edge devices and Auror’s cloud platform.

You’ll be part of the ASR software engineering team, working closely across product, engineering and commercial teams to define how this role operates and where it can have the greatest impact. As Auror expands to more stores and retailers globally, the systems, capabilities and standards you establish will help make that growth possible. If you want genuine ownership of a complex physical-meets-software problem, with the opportunity to shape the future of edge AI at Auror, this is that role.

Location

• For Senior level and above, we are open to considering remote candidates within New Zealand.

About Auror Engineering

Collaboration is at the heart of the Engineering team at Auror. We believe that we can only build the very best software by working with each other and seeking different perspectives to solve problems. We’re a team that:

• Ship code to production constantly: Our product team ships code to production on average at least 10-15 times a day prioritising small releases and short feedback cycles and we do this with a minimal defect rate.

• Work on cloud native architecture: We focus on delivering business value to customers, without the burden of maintaining complex infrastructure

• Work on innovative and up to date tech stacks: We are constantly evolving our technology stack inline with the needs of our business, leveraging React and Typescript for front-end and C# / Dotnet for back end. We host our services in Azure and utilise a wide range of cloud-native services with an evolving service-oriented architecture.

• Contribute to our product: We work with Product Management and Product Design from the very beginning to make sure we’re delivering value to our customers and making a meaningful impact.

• Supports a coaching culture: Together, we support one another to level up

• Continuously improve: We are relentless about getting better and improving our processes, tooling and tech stack.

What you’ll do

• Designing and building new subject recognition capabilities using off the shelf SDKs and 3rd party integrations, including functionality that spans on-camera processing, in-store servers and Auror’s cloud platform

• Building comparison harnesses and evaluation tooling to quantify how new face recognition models or engine versions perform against previous ones, including calibrating thresholds and interpreting score distributions, so changes go to production with evidence, not assumptions in collaboration with the AI/Data Science team

• Designing and implementing observability through tracing, structured logging, metrics and alerting, giving Auror’s support teams and customers’ SOC and IT teams visibility into systems they cannot physically access

• Improving the reliability and resilience of the edge estate, and debugging complex production issues that span process, container, host, network and cloud layers

• Integrating and managing third-party SDKs and hardware dependencies, including diagnosing issues and working directly with vendors when their technology is contributing to a problem

• Building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines for artefacts deployed to physical devices, so new functionality and upgrades can be delivered safely across the estate at scale

• Working within the ASR software engineering team, primarily in .NET and C#, while collaborating across Auror and bringing deep systems expertise from whichever languages and technologies you have built your career in

About you

• 5+ years of experience across software, systems or infrastructure engineering, with experience owning production systems that run on devices or infrastructure outside your company’s direct control

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and experience designing, building and operating capabilities that span edge devices and cloud services

• Production experience with containerised workloads on edge or embedded Linux devices, using technologies such as IoT Edge, Balena, k3s or equivalent

• Strong debugging skills across process, container, host, network and cloud boundaries, with a detective instinct: you pull threads until you find the actual root cause, not just a plausible one

• Hands-on experience with observability tooling, including distributed tracing, structured logging, metrics and alerting design

• Practical evaluation skills, including building comparison harnesses to quantify performance differences between model or system versions, and interpreting trade-offs such as latency, accuracy and compute constraints

• Comfortable integrating third-party SDKs, hardware and vendor dependencies into production software, and managing the complexity that comes with them

• Cloud platform fluency, with GCP preferred, or experience in AWS or Azure and evidence that you can transfer your skills

• Familiarity with .NET and C# is ideal, or the ability to quickly become effective in a new language and technology stack

• Strong project leadership and communication skills, with the ability to take ownership of complex work and collaborate effectively across Product, Engineering and commercial team

• We are looking for people who demonstrate a strong alignment to our Guiding Principles (you can find these on our Careers page).

Auror is committed to providing an inclusive and accessible application process to all candidates and we are actively working to improve diversity within the tech industry. We celebrate diversity and inclusiveness at Auror, regardless of (but not limited to) race, gender, sexual orientation, family status, religion, ethnicity, national origin, physical disability, veteran status, or age.

If you need adjustments to any part of our recruitment process because of accessibility reasons, please do not hesitate to let us know during the application process. We will work with you to identify adjustments that will allow you to perform at your best.

What are the benefits like?

• Competitive salary range: Depending on level of experience a starting salary of $120,000 - 150,000 (IC3).

• Annual bonus: Eligibility for a NZD$3,300 (IC3) bonus at the end of the financial year if we’ve hit our revenue goals together.

• Employee share scheme: You’ll own part of a company making a real difference!

• Flexibility: We are hard-working and outcome focused, but recognise there is more to life than work. We promote a healthy work/life blend.

• Shorter work weeks (at full pay): Everyone gets Friday afternoons off, so you can start your weekend early, and do more of whatever it is that makes you happy.

• Focus on mental and physical health: We understand how vital our health is and have policies to support your wellness, including Wellness Days, and up to $750 NZD for expert sessions every year.

• Health Care Plan: We prioritise looking after your health by offering cover under our premier health business insurance plan through nib health insurance - with Auror covering 100% of your premium.

• Family-friendly: We offer comprehensive paid parental leave - 12 weeks for birth parents and 6 weeks for non-birth parents following birth, adoption, or surrogacy, available to all Aurors from day one.

• Personal growth: We support our team to participate in courses, conferences, or events that will help them develop their skills.

• Team love: We have regular team lunches and social events where most (if not all) activities are during work hours.

What are the next steps?

If you’re excited about our mission and you have the experience and a passion for this role, please hit “Apply”.

If you’re not sure that you tick all the boxes but feel you’re close to what we’re looking for, please apply anyway! We’re proud that Auror is a place where everyone can learn and grow so we’d love to hear from you.

You'll be asked to submit a cover letter as part of your application. While this is optional we do encourage it, as we find cover letters can tell a story that resumes alone often cannot. Our hiring team love to understand what attracted you to this role and why you are excited about the opportunity to join Auror.

Once you apply, you’ll hear from us to acknowledge your application. If you have questions about any of the above, or if you have any accessibility requirements, we’ll be able to help you from there.