Senior Systems Engineer (ASR - Hardware/OnPrem)

Job description

**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) and License Plate Recognition (LPR) technology runs on an edge estate, on-camera and on-server, sitting in thousands of retail stores all across the world. Your job is to make that estate observable, reliable, upgradeable and supportable at scale, so our support teams and customer SOC/IT teams can see problems coming and respond before a customer ever notices, and so Auror can move the underlying face recognition model forward with real evidence behind every change. That brings a unique set of systems challenges: debugging across device, container, host and network boundaries, building the observability and evaluation tooling that tells us whether what we've shipped to a store is actually working, and weighing up trade-offs like latency versus accuracy on constrained hardware. You'll be embedded within the ASR’s software engineering team, but will collaborate with teams across Auror to define how this role operates and where it has the most impact. As we scale to more stores and more retailers globally, the systems and standards you put in place now will be what makes that growth possible. You'll work closely across product, engineering and commercial to define how this role operates and where it has the most impact. If you want genuine ownership of a hard, physical-meets-software problem, 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** - Owning the deployment and reliability of containerised workloads running on edge/embedded devices in stores across our retail partners, including being accountable when something breaks at fleet scale - Building comparison harnesses and evaluation tooling to quantify how new face recognition model or engine versions perform against previous ones, including calibrating thresholds and interpreting score distributions, so model changes go to production with evidence, not assumptions - Designing and implementing observability (tracing, structured logging, metrics, alerting) that gives Auror support and customer SOC/IT teams real visibility into systems neither team has physical access to - Debugging production issues that span process, container, host and network layers on devices deployed outside our own infrastructure, often starting with nothing more than a bad log line - Integrating and managing third-party SDKs and hardware vendor dependencies, including owning the relationship when the vendor's product turns out to be the source of the bug - Building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines for artefacts deployed to physical devices, not just servers, so the estate stays upgradeable at scale - Working within the ASR software engineering team, primarily in .NET/C#, while collaborating across Auror and bringing deep expertise from whatever language you've built your systems career in **About you** - ~5+ years in systems or infrastructure engineering, with at least 3 years owning systems deployed to devices outside a company's own data centre, and comfortable with the reliability demands of running at fleet scale - Production experience with containerised workloads on edge or embedded Linux devices, such as IoT Edge, Balena, k3s, Greengrass or equivalent - Strong debugging skills across process, container, host and network boundaries, with a detective instinct: you pull threads until you've found the actual root cause, not just a plausible one - Hands-on experience with observability tooling, distributed tracing, structured logs, metrics and alerting design - Practical evaluation skills, building comparison harnesses to quantify performance differences between model or system versions, and interpreting trade-offs like latency versus accuracy on constrained hardware - Comfortable managing third-party SDKs and vendor dependencies as a normal part of the job - Cloud platform fluency, GCP preferred, AWS or Azure also fine with evidence of transferable skill - Familiarity with .NET/C# is ideal, as that's the stack our evaluation and tooling work runs on - Strong project management and communication skills, able to work through complex projects across Product and Engineering with a fair amount of ownership - We are looking for people who demonstrate a strong alignment to our Guiding Principles (you can find these on our [Careers page](https://www.auror.co/company-careers)). 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.