Senior/Staff Software Engineer (FE Leaning)

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

As a Senior / Staff Software Engineer, Frontend Leaning, in Risk Detection, you’ll be a senior individual contributor working on one of Auror’s most strategically important product areas.

You’ll help shape the experiences that enable retailers to understand, investigate, and respond to crime in real time, including capabilities across Auror Subject Recognition (ASR) and our broader Risk Detection platform.

This is a frontend-leaning role, but not a frontend-only role. You’ll spend much of your time working in React and TypeScript, shaping complex product experiences and frontend architecture, while being comfortable moving through APIs, services, data flows, and our .NET backend when solving an end-to-end problem requires it.

Risk Detection presents some unusually interesting product and engineering challenges. Detections can originate from cameras and edge systems, flow through distributed cloud services, and need to become clear, timely, actionable experiences for users within seconds. The interfaces we build need to communicate complex information simply, perform reliably under real-world conditions, and support responsible decision-making in a sensitive domain.

You’ll work closely with Product, Design, QE, and engineers across the stack to turn ambiguous problems into thoughtful, scalable product experiences. At Staff level, you’ll also influence technical direction across teams, establish patterns that improve how we build frontend software, and help other engineers solve complex problems without needing formal people-management responsibilities.

Success in this role means shipping high-quality customer experiences, raising the technical bar across our frontend systems, making the engineers around you more effective, and helping Risk Detection evolve as Auror expands into new customers, regions, and detection capabilities.

Location

• For Senior level and above, we are also open to considering fully 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:

Build Exceptional Risk Detection Experiences

• Design and build sophisticated product experiences across Auror’s Risk Detection capabilities, including ASR.

• Turn complex detection, identity, alert, and investigation workflows into intuitive experiences that help users understand what is happening and take appropriate action quickly.

• Work closely with Product and Design from problem discovery through delivery, bringing engineering thinking into product decisions early rather than simply implementing finished designs.

• Champion accessibility, usability, performance, and resilience as fundamental parts of product quality.

Lead Frontend Architecture and Engineering

• Help define and evolve the architecture of our React and TypeScript applications so they remain maintainable as product complexity and team size grow.

• Establish pragmatic patterns for state management, data fetching, component design, testing, observability, performance, and frontend platform concerns.

• Identify areas where shared foundations, abstractions, or tooling can meaningfully improve developer productivity without introducing unnecessary complexity.

• Make thoughtful build-versus-buy and short-term-versus-long-term trade-offs, clearly communicating the reasoning behind important technical decisions.

Own Problems End to End

• Work beyond the browser when required, contributing to APIs, services, event flows, and .NET systems to deliver complete customer outcomes.

• Develop a strong understanding of the systems behind Risk Detection, from POI enrolment and detection processing through to the experiences customers use every day.

• Partner with backend, edge, platform, and other product engineers to design cohesive solutions across system boundaries.

• Break large or ambiguous technical problems into safe, meaningful increments that can be delivered and learned from quickly.

Raise the Engineering Bar

• Provide technical leadership through design reviews, pairing, code reviews, RFCs, mentoring, and hands-on implementation.

• Help engineers make sound decisions around architecture, reliability, testing, security, privacy, and maintainability.

• Identify systemic engineering problems and drive improvements that benefit more than one feature or squad.

• At Staff level, influence engineering direction beyond the immediate team and help create alignment where problems cross team or domain boundaries.

Improve How We Build With AI

• Thoughtfully incorporate LLMs and agentic engineering tools into development, testing, code review, debugging, and delivery workflows.

• Experiment with new approaches while maintaining appropriate human oversight, security, privacy, and quality controls.

• Share successful practices with the wider Engineering team and help establish repeatable patterns that make engineers more effective.

Build Reliable, Responsible Software

• Strengthen observability, operational readiness, and incident response for the customer experiences and services you work on.

• Design for systems where latency, correctness, and reliability directly affect customer trust.

• Champion privacy-conscious engineering, particularly where experiences involve biometric or other sensitive information.

• Help ensure our technology meets regulatory and retailer expectations while still enabling product innovation.

About you

• Strong frontend engineering expertise: Deep experience building sophisticated production applications with React and TypeScript, including the architectural judgement required to keep large frontend systems maintainable over time.

• Product engineering mindset: You care about the customer problem as much as the implementation. You work effectively with Product and Design, challenge assumptions constructively, and use technical insight to improve the solution.

• Full-stack fluency: You’re frontend leaning rather than frontend limited. You’re comfortable reasoning about APIs, distributed systems, data flows, and backend services, and ideally have experience with C#, .NET, or a comparable server-side ecosystem.

• Technical leadership: You raise the capability of the engineers around you through clear technical thinking, mentoring, reviews, documentation, and example. Staff candidates will have demonstrated influence across multiple teams or a broader engineering domain.

• Architecture and systems thinking: You can move between detailed implementation decisions and the wider system, considering performance, scalability, reliability, maintainability, privacy, and customer experience together.

• Pragmatic decision-making: You know when to invest in foundations and when to ship the simpler solution. You can navigate trade-offs between immediate customer value and long-term technical health.

• Delivery mindset: You turn ambiguous or complex problems into meaningful, shippable increments and take ownership of getting software safely into customers’ hands.

• Passion for product quality: You see quality as more than visual polish. Accessibility, reliability, performance, security, data integrity, and operational excellence are all part of building a great product.

• Clear communication: You can explain complicated technical concepts and trade-offs to engineers, Product, Design, and non-technical stakeholders.

• Curiosity about AI-assisted engineering: You’ve used, or are excited to use, AI and LLM tooling thoughtfully to improve software engineering workflows and outcomes.

• 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 / $145,000 - 170,000 (IC3/IC4).

• Annual bonus: Eligibility for a NZD$3,300 (IC3) or $5,500 (IC4) 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.