(Senior) Data 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 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 Data Engineering Lead, you’ll scale the data foundations that help Auror achieve its mission: reducing violent retail crime by 50% in five years. You’ll lead the technical direction and day-to-day delivery of our data engineering team — building the scalable, observable, and trusted data platform that powers our products, insights, and AI capabilities.

This is a role for someone who loves both building and leading. You’ll stay close to the code while raising the technical bar, coaching engineers to do their best work, and partnering across Data & AI, Product, Engineering and Platform to turn complex data challenges into real-world impact.

Success means more than shipping pipelines and infrastructure. It means building a team that delivers with confidence, creating data products people can rely on, and ensuring Auror has the trusted data foundation it needs to help retailers, law enforcement, and communities prevent harm, act faster, and make safer decisions.

Practically this will involve:

Technical Leadership & Delivery

• Lead the design and delivery of scalable, reliable, and observable data platforms, pipelines, and consumption models using technologies such as Dagster, Airflow, dbt, Apache Iceberg, Cloud Spanner, and BigQuery. Design and evolve data models that enable trusted, well governed, and high performance analytics and operational use cases.

• Partner closely with software engineering teams to design data models and integration patterns that support new product capabilities, ensuring data is modelled for both operational and analytical consumption from the outset.

• Own and evolve data infrastructure across Azure, Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Snowflake, and Terraform, ensuring infrastructure is reusable, secure, well governed, and resilient.

• Drive continuous improvements in data quality, reliability, and observability by identifying the largest sources of operational toil and rework, then delivering measurable outcomes.

• Review high risk technical designs and production changes, ensuring solutions are observable, thoroughly tested, rollback ready, and maintainable before release.

• Manage the full lifecycle of data assets, including metadata, logging, retention policies, and access governance, ensuring the platform remains secure, compliant, and scalable.

People Leadership

• Build and support a high-performing team of data engineers, setting clear expectations, providing regular and actionable feedback, and creating growth plans aligned to individual strengths and business needs.

• Build a learning-oriented team culture by modelling openness to feedback, creating clarity during uncertainty, and helping team members reframe challenges as opportunities to grow.

• Apply pay, promotion, and role-change frameworks consistently and transparently — making people decisions grounded in evidence, role expectations, and impact.

• Hire thoughtfully to build a team with the right skills, mindset, and values — holding a high bar and creating an inclusive environment where everyone belongs.

Collaboration & Ways of Working

• Partner with software engineers, platform engineers, data science, and insights to integrate effectively with our data platform — communicating constraints and options early to avoid late surprises.

• Translate product and business goals into practical technical plans with clear milestones, making trade-offs explicit and challenging work that adds complexity without clear customer value.

• Connect the team's day-to-day work to Auror's broader mission — sharing context behind decisions and communicating changes with empathy and clarity.

You’ll be reporting to Nigel Wright, Director of Platform Engineering

I’m an experienced (read: old) and passionate SRE/Platform Engineering leader who gets real joy from automation, reducing shipping friction from engineering teams, and enabling them to understand just what their code is doing in production. I’ve worn many hats in my journey to get here (Support, DevOps Consultant, Technical Presales, SRE IC, Director of Security) and this has given me a somewhat unique perspective which mainly manifests as a DEEP sense of customer empathy, and engineering pain points. I’ve been leaning in on using AI to help speed up building internal tooling and reducing toil, and there is a strong place in in the SRE world for well guided, context-rich AI agents to help us focus on the truly important things such as reliability, scalability and “are our customers actually getting value from the things we are shipping”.

I’m still very much “on the tools”, and this is something that brings me great joy!

Outside of work, I play bass in a couple of bands and am on the eternal quest to find / cook the perfect cheeseburger.

About you

• Significant experience building and operating modern cloud data platforms, with deep expertise in data engineering, orchestration, transformation, and data warehousing.

• Strong hands-on experience with technologies such as Snowflake, Dagster, DBT,Iceberg, Spanner, Big Query , and cloud platforms such as Azure and Google Cloud.

• Experience designing and maintaining reliable, observable data pipelines and infrastructure, with a strong focus on data quality, monitoring, security, and operational excellence.

• Proficiency with infrastructure-as-code practices using Terraform, and a strong understanding of CI/CD, automation, containerisation, kubernetes and platform engineering principles.

• Experience leading technical delivery, setting engineering standards, writing approach reviews, conducting design and code reviews, and helping teams make sound architectural decisions.

• Experience leading and developing engineers through coaching, regular feedback, performance conversations, hiring, and career development.

• Strong communication skills, with the ability to explain complex technical concepts, influence decisions, and build trusted relationships across technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Sound judgment when balancing delivery, technical debt, scalability, and operational risk, with a focus on solving customer problems rather than pursuing unnecessary complexity.

• An ability to input into, and drive our Data Engineering strategy, with the capability to keep an eye on trends and tooling that could help us meet our goals.

• A collaborative leadership style that creates psychological safety, encourages learning, and fosters accountability and continuous improvement.

• A genuine passion for using data and technology to solve meaningful real-world problems, with an excitement for helping Auror build products that make communities safer.

• Experience with AI tooling around data, such as Claude Code- specifically managing and building reusable context for data

• Awareness of open table formats and technologies such as Arrow.

• 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 $135,000 to $180,000 (PL3 to PL4)

• Annual bonus: Eligibility for a NZD $5,500 (PL3) or $8,250 (PL4, Senior) 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.