Engineering Lead (Subject Recognition / On Prem)

About Auror

 

At Auror, we’re empowering the retail industry to reduce 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. Our current mission is to reduce violent retail crime by 50% in 5 years.

 

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

As Engineering Lead (Subject Recognition / On Prem), you'll lead one of the engineering teams responsible for one of Auror's most strategically important product areas. You'll provide technical and people leadership across Auror Subject Recognition (ASR), helping shape the technology that enables retailers to detect and respond to crime in real time.

A significant focus of the role will be taking FaceRec Edge from pilot to reliable, multi-site production. That means defining what a "healthy" deployment actually looks like across a fleet of cameras and on-prem servers, in Detection quality as well as uptime, and building the practice that keeps that estate reliable as it grows.

Working at the intersection of AI, distributed systems, and privacy conscious engineering, you'll ensure our platforms meet the highest standards of performance, reliability, and responsible use of technology.

Success in this role means growing a high performing engineering team that ships with confidence and consistency, delivers innovative Risk Detection capabilities, and enables Auror to continue expanding its impact around the world.

 

What you’ll do:

• Lead Engineering the Subject Recognition On-Prem team

  • Lead engineering for Auror's on-prem face recognition platform — the edge devices, detection pipeline and vendor model integration — setting clear technical direction while keeping the team aligned to shared Risk Detection priorities and customer outcomes.

  • Run structured sprint rituals, including stand-ups, retrospectives and planning, keeping the team focused on delivering meaningful outcomes.

• Define and Own Estate Health

  • Establish a concrete, agreed definition of a healthy deployment — per camera, per server, per site — spanning detection quality as well as availability, owned jointly with Product and Support.

  • Make estate health measurable and actionable, so it drives what the team works on rather than sitting on a dashboard.

• Manage the complexity of running software at the edge

  • Help the team maintain a serviceable environment on edge computing devices that are not under our control.

  • You bring your experience and insight to help the team observe changes in performance, availability, and model detection accuracy then respond to those signals in order to deliver a software + services product that delights customers.

• Make Model Upgrades an Organisational Capability

  • Own the go/no-go on face recognition model generations, grounded in evidence from shadowed production traffic rather than vendor benchmarks.

  • Broker operating-point decisions — the false-positive/false-negative trade-off — to an agreed position with Product and Trust & Safety, and hold our vendor to account on calibration and evaluation support.

  • Treat accuracy regression as a reliability concern: detection quality inside the observability framework, with drift detection and a rollout/rollback path that doesn't require a site visit.

• Raise the Bar on Operational Excellence

  • Strengthen observability, incident response and escalation across edge and cloud, with blameless postmortems that change something.

  • Drive a deliberate, measured reduction in toil — shifting the team's time from firefighting to building capability.

  • Set clear engineering standards and drive pragmatic quality across systems where accuracy, latency and reliability directly impact customer trust.

  • Guide architectural decisions that evolve Risk Detection into scalable, service oriented platforms that support future growth without unnecessary complexity.

• Grow the Team

  • Build and grow a high performing engineering team through coaching, mentoring and technical leadership.

  • Eliminate single points of failure through pairing, rotation and written documentation, and actively guard the team's sustainability through the pilot-to-production transition.

• Champion Responsible Engineering

  • Champion responsible, privacy conscious engineering practices across Risk Detection, ensuring solutions meet regulatory expectations and retailer privacy requirements while enabling continued innovation.

• Lead Agentic Engineering Processes

  • Embed governed, agentic AI practices across the team. Champion LLMs and agentic tooling as force multipliers for delivery, code review and testing, establishing repeatable workflows with appropriate guardrails, human oversight and quality gates. Continuously measure impact and share successful practices across Engineering.

     

This role reports to Jakob Sorensen, Director of Engineering.

I've spent 20 years in engineering, starting out in capital markets in Copenhagen before finding my home in SaaS. I began deep in the technical detail, building real-time pricing and financial risk platforms, and over the years found I loved helping teams and the people in them grow just as much as the systems we were building. That's taken me into leadership across a few different countries and domains, and what's kept me hooked the whole time is variety and genuinely hard problems.

 

Auror sits right at the intersection that matters most to me: An incredibly meaningful purpose with real-world impact and hard engineering problems. I lead in a way that's outcome-driven, authentic, people-centred and pragmatic. Growing leaders is the part of the job I find most rewarding, and underneath it all is high performance and psychological safety: I work hard to build environments where people can be honest, challenge each other, and learn out loud, because that's where the best teams come from. I'm hiring people who are curious, love solving problems, and do their best work for our customers as part of a team.

 

Originally from Denmark, I now call Auckland home with my wife Matilde and our three kids. Outside of work I'm an ultra marathon runner, a hobby guitarist and songwriter, and I once crossed the Atlantic as crew on a 44-foot sailing boat, an adventure which has shaped how I think about risk, adaptability and what actually matters.

 

Who we’re looking for

• Proven technical expertise: Strong proficiency in C#, .NET Core (or newer), distributed and edge systems, cloud-native architectures (GCP preferred), coupled with the ability to understand technical decisions in the context of business value.

• On-prem and fleet experience: Has owned infrastructure sitting on premises the team doesn't control, whether that's customer-sited hardware or another field-deployed context, with the sizing, patching, remote management and hardware lifecycle that entails.

• Leadership experience: Demonstrated experience leading engineering teams, managing performance, and cultivating a culture of accountability and excellence.

• Communication skills: The ability to distill complex technical concepts for a variety of audiences, including non technical stakeholders. Experience leading tradeoff calls with non technical stakeholders

• Passion for integrating AI: Experience or interest in leveraging AI tools and LLMs as force multipliers for your team—not just following trends, but thoughtfully applying these technologies to enhance engineering practices, streamline workflows and accelerate delivery.

• Big picture thinking: A strategic mindset that considers the broader business impact of engineering decisions, including scalability, performance, maintainability, and user experience when guiding architectural discussions.

• Prioritisation and decision-making: Skill in helping teams navigate trade-offs between immediate value and long-term technical health, breaking complex initiatives into meaningful, shippable increments..

• Passion for product quality: A strong understanding that technical excellence manifests as reliability, scalability, security, and data integrity, particularly crucial in our context of crime prevention and building safer communities.

• 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 $142,500 - 172,500 (PL3).

• Annual bonus: Eligibility for a $5,500 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.