Engineering Lead

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 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

Collaboration and growth mindset are at the heart of the Engineering team at Auror. We believe that to build impactful software it requires both technical excellence and empowered teams. Our leaders intentionally balance high care with high performance, shaping an environment where engineers thrive personally while delivering exceptional business outcomes for our customers.

We believe in pushing decision making to where the information lives, creating clarity that enables innovation. Joining as the Engineering Lead, you'll guide this engineering team through the continued development of our defining product capabilities. The teams handle part of the product that serves as the key collaboration point between customers and law enforcement, driving real-world impact to reduce crime. You will guide and build a high performing team, ready to tackle some of the upcoming scaling challenges and evolving the product capability.

Opportunities and challenges

We believe in transparency: You'll be working with a system that was built by talented engineers, but as our customer base and company mission has grown  we now have the chance to architect solutions that scale our platform for the next phase of growth. This presents a unique opportunity for the incoming Engineering Lead to shape team culture and technical direction with the support of experienced Auror engineers who understand our domain deeply.

This role offers a genuine leadership opportunity, bringing fresh energy to the team, establishing sustainable engineering practices, and guiding pivotal architectural decisions for a core  product capability.

What You'll Do:

• Lead the engineering team by creating clarity and distributing authority, not just delegating tasks. You will mentor engineers by asking the right questions rather than simply providing answers.
• Drive technical excellence in a core domain by establishing clear intent, articulating the “why” behind decisions, and shifting control to where context lives within the team.
• Balance hands on development with strategic leadership, diving into code when needed while empowering your team to own significant technical decisions and delivery.
• Architect the evolution of our critical entry point systems toward a service-oriented architecture, ensuring we can scale to support our growth trajectory while enhancing the user experience.
• Leverage AI tools strategically to amplify your team's capabilities, integrating GitHub Copilot, Cursor, ChatGPT, and Claude to accelerate development without sacrificing quality.
• Champion engineering practices that foster both deliberate action and innovation, this might include things like having thoughtful testing strategies, efficient code reviews, and comprehensive documentation that allow us to scale.
• Collaborate with product leadership to ensure technical decisions amplify business impact, particularly in this highly impactful area of the product.

This role reports to Alicia Liebenberg, Director of Engin