Senior Engineering Lead (Risk Detections)

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. Our current mission is to reduce violent retail crime by 50% in 5 years.

Founded in New Zealand 11 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.

About the role 

At Auror, strong collaboration and a growth mindset underpin how we build software. We believe meaningful impact comes from combining technical excellence with empowered, healthy teams.

As Senior Engineering Lead within our Risk Detection domain, you will lead a team responsible for core detection capabilities including License Plate Recognition (LPR) and Automatic Subject Recognition (ASR).

This team transforms high-volume, real-world signals, such as vehicle movements and subject identification, into accurate, actionable detections that help retailers and law enforcement prevent and respond to harm.

These capabilities sit at the heart of Auror’s value proposition. They directly influence customer trust, operational decision-making, and real-world outcomes. Performance, correctness, and security are critical, as is the ability to operate reliably at scale in near real-time environments.

You will build and lead a high-performing team, strengthen engineering practices, and work closely with product, design, data, and adjacent engineering streams. Your role is to create clarity and momentum, enabling teams to make strong decisions close to where context lives.

Opportunities and challenges

You will be joining a space built by experienced engineers with deep domain knowledge across detection systems and high-throughput event processing.

As Auror grows, both LPR and ASR capabilities are expanding across regions, customers, and use cases, increasing the complexity and scale of the systems that support them.

This creates a meaningful opportunity to evolve the Risk Detection platform to:

• Support significantly higher data volumes and event throughput
• Improve detection accuracy and confidence at scale
• Strengthen observability and operational reliability
• Enable faster iteration on detection models and pipelines
• Maintain strict standards around privacy, security, and data integrity

This is a genuine leadership opportunity to shape how intelligent detection systems are built and operated at scale, while growing people, strengthening culture, and influencing mission-critical outcomes.

What You’ll Do:

• Lead with clarity and collaboration: Partner closely with product and cross-stream stakeholders, working with other engineering leads and teams in the Risk Detection group to plan and deliver work collaboratively, while maintaining collective ownership of the product.
• Raise the bar on technical excellence: Set clear intent, articulate the “why,” and drive a culture of pragmatic engineering quality in systems where accuracy, latency, and reliability directly affect customer trust and real-world outcomes.
• Balance hands-on leadership with empowerment: Stay close enough to the work to unblock, review critical changes, and model strong technical judgement—while enabling engineers to own major technical decisions and delivery end-to-end. Mentor engineers through strong questions, coaching, and feedback, not just answers.
• Evolve our Risk Detection platform for scale: Guide architectural decisions that move us toward more scalable, resilient, service-oriented patterns—supporting increasing data volumes, new regions, and expanding use cases while keeping performance and operability front of mind.
• Build operational excellence: Strengthen observability, incident readiness, and on-call sustainability so the team can confidently run and improve mission-critical services.
• Use AI tooling to amplify delivery (without sacrificing quality): Help the team adopt tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, ChatGPT, and Claude in a way that accelerates development, improves learning, and maintains strong engineering standards.
• Champion scalable engineering practices: Establish fit-for-purpose testing strategies, efficient code review habits, and documentation that makes systems understandable, supportable, and safe to change as the stream grows.
• Partner tightly with product and cross-stream stakeholders: Collaborate with product leadership (and adjacent engineering streams) to ensure technical decisions translate into measurable customer impact in this highly sensitive and high-value area of the product.

This role reports to Alicia Liebenberg, Director of Engineering 

I’ve spent two decades growing through the full arc of software engineering: from a software engineer, through release and platform roles, and eventually into leading multiple engineering teams across product, platform, and operational domains. My background sits firmly in the SaaS and enterprise software world, building systems that need to scale, stay resilient, and serve customers who depend on them every day.

I lead with clarity, curiosity, and a people-first mindset. I believe great engineering happens when teams feel safe, supported, and challenged in all the right ways. I care deeply about craft, communication, and creating an environment where people do the best work of their careers. You’ll find me pushing for pragmatism, sharing context early and often, and looking for the story underneath the technical work so we stay connected to the impact we’re making.

If you join the team, you can expect partnership, honest feedback, space to grow, and someone who genuinely wants you to succeed.