Full-Stack Software Engineer (AI/ML)

Salary: $100,000 – $150,000 per year

About Kara Technologies

Kara Technologies develops AI-powered sign language translation technology that makes information and digital experiences more accessible to Deaf communities.

Named the 2026 NZ Hi-Tech Awards Startup of the Year, we are building technology at the intersection of artificial intelligence, natural language processing, computer animation, and accessible product design.

About the role

We are looking for a highly capable Full-Stack Software Engineer to help build the next generation of Kara’s AI-powered products.

This is a hands-on, intermediate-level software engineering role spanning Python, AI and NLP systems, APIs, and modern frontend development. You will build customer-facing features, improve the systems behind our translation technology, and help turn new AI capabilities into reliable production software.

Frontend development is a substantial part of this position. You will contribute directly to the applications used by our customers and internal teams, while also working with Python-based AI services and language-processing workflows.

You will be encouraged to use modern AI coding agents to accelerate your work. However, we are looking for someone with strong software engineering fundamentals who can understand, evaluate, test, debug, and take responsibility for all code they contribute.

This role offers significant room to develop your expertise in applied AI, NLP, software architecture, and end-to-end product development.

What you will do

1. Build and maintain customer-facing frontend features using JavaScript or TypeScript and a modern framework such as React.

2. Develop Python applications, APIs, services, and data-processing workflows that support Kara’s translation technology.

3. Deliver complete features across frontend, backend, database, API, and AI components.

4. Integrate large language models and other AI or NLP technologies into production applications.

5. Develop prompts, structured outputs, validation processes, and evaluation workflows for reliable AI-powered features.

6. Investigate AI failure cases and improve the accuracy, consistency, and robustness of language-processing systems.

7. Build internal tools that help linguists, animators, and other team members review and improve AI-generated outputs.

8. Use AI coding agents effectively for implementation, codebase exploration, debugging, refactoring, documentation, and testing.

9. Review AI-generated code critically and ensure it meets our standards for correctness, security, performance, and maintainability.

10. Write clean, well-structured, and well-tested software.

11. Participate in technical design discussions, code reviews, estimation, and planning.

12. Diagnose issues across the technology stack and support applications running in production.

13. Collaborate with engineers, linguists, animators, product stakeholders, clients, and members of the Deaf community.

14. Explore relevant developments in AI, NLP, and software engineering and identify practical opportunities to apply them within Kara’s products.

What we are looking for

1. At least two (2) years of professional software development experience, or equivalent evidence of strong practical engineering ability.

2. Strong Python programming skills, including experience developing maintainable production applications or services.

3. Professional frontend development experience using JavaScript or TypeScript and a framework such as React, Vue, or Angular.

4. Experience working with APIs, databases, version control, automated testing, and modern software development practices.

5. Strong computer science fundamentals and the ability to reason through complex technical problems.

6. The ability to independently understand, debug, improve, and maintain code across an unfamiliar codebase.

7. Practical experience with, or a strong demonstrated interest in, machine learning, NLP, large language models, or generative AI.

8. Experience using AI coding assistants or agents as part of a professional development workflow.

9. Sound engineering judgement and the ability to distinguish a quick prototype from production-quality software.

10. Strong written and verbal communication skills in English.

11. The ability to work collaboratively and take ownership in a fast-moving startup environment.

12. A degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, AI, or a related discipline, or equivalent professional experience.

We care more about demonstrated ability, learning speed, and engineering judgement than whether you meet every listed requirement.

Preferred experience

Experience in any of the following would be valuable but is not required:

1. Building applications using commercial or open-source large language models.

2. Applied NLP tasks such as classification, information extraction, semantic matching, machine translation, or structured text generation.

3. LLM evaluation, prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, fine-tuning, or model inference.

4. AI and NLP libraries such as PyTorch, Hugging Face Transformers, spaCy, or similar tools.

5. Python API frameworks such as FastAPI, Flask, or Django.

6. React, TypeScript, component-based frontend architecture, and modern state-management approaches.

7. Cloud deployment and application development on AWS.

8. CI/CD, containerisation, monitoring, logging, and production support.

9. Linguistics, machine translation, accessibility technology, animation systems, or sign language.

10. Working directly with customers to understand requirements and deliver practical technical solutions.

11. Agile development within a multidisciplinary product team.

Who this role will suit

This role will suit someone who is a software engineer first and is excited about applying AI to meaningful, technically challenging problems.

You may already be working as a full-stack or backend engineer and want to develop deeper AI and NLP experience. Alternatively, you may have experience building AI applications and want broader ownership across frontend, backend, and production systems.

You should enjoy learning unfamiliar technologies, exploring complex codebases, and solving problems that do not always have an obvious answer. You should also be comfortable moving between AI experimentation and the disciplined engineering required to deliver dependable software.

This is not a no-code, prompt-only, or purely research-focused position. You will be expected to write, review, test, debug, and maintain production code.

What we offer

1. The opportunity to build practical AI technology with a meaningful social impact.

2. Hands-on experience across AI, NLP, frontend development, backend services, and cloud applications.

3. The chance to work on real AI products used by customers, rather than isolated demonstrations or prototypes.

4. Significant ownership and the ability to influence how products and technical systems are designed.

5. Opportunities to grow toward AI specialisation, software architecture, or technical leadership.

6. Close collaboration with an experienced multidisciplinary engineering and product team.

7. A flexible, collaborative, and friendly startup environment.

8. Competitive salary and opportunities for professional development.

Why join Kara?

At Kara, AI is not an add-on to an existing product. It is a core part of the technology we are building.

You will work on challenging problems involving language, translation, accessibility, animation, and human communication. Your work will move from ideas and experiments into production features used by real people, giving you the opportunity to grow as both a software engineer and an applied AI practitioner.