Staff Quality Assurance Engineer

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.

The Role

As a Staff Quality Assurance Engineer (IC4), you will be a senior technical and strategic contributor whose impact is felt across multiple teams and product areas. This role moves beyond the traditional QA gatekeeper model. You’ll guide others in building quality into every stage of the software development lifecycle, from shaping requirements to designing robust automation frameworks.

You’ll lead complex quality initiatives that improve how we test, release, and scale our platform. Your influence will extend beyond individual projects: you’ll contribute to architectural decisions, mentor other QEs and Engineers, and help define the long-term quality strategy for your domain and the wider engineering organization. You’ll balance strategic thinking with hands-on delivery,  ensuring Auror’s systems are stable, scalable, and continuously improving.

Practically this will look like:

• Shape and lead quality strategies across multiple teams, aligning practices with Auror’s product and engineering goals.
• Identify and address systemic quality risks, using your broad architectural understanding to strengthen reliability, performance, and maintainability.
• Design and implement scalable automation frameworks that improve test coverage and CI/CD efficiency across the product suite.
• Partner with engineering and product leaders to influence technical direction and ensure quality insights drive decision-making.
• Coach and mentor others, building capability across teams through pairing, feedback, and knowledge sharing.
• Drive continuous improvement, running retrospectives and leading Quality Horizon initiatives that evolve how Auror builds and tests software.
• Facilitate clarity and alignment, tailoring communication for technical and non-technical audiences to move initiatives forward.
• Model collaboration and ownership, helping teams navigate ambiguity, conflicting priorities, and complex stakeholder environments.
  

You will be reporting to Aroha Merrilees, Quality Engineering Lead

I bring a diverse career background to this role, having worked across various areas of the tech industry, including development, consulting, application support, and, of course, quality engineering. This range of experience helps me understand business needs and challenges from multiple perspectives.

I am a highly relational leader, focused on building strong connections within my team and across Auror. I believe these relationships are key to fostering both professional and personal growth for my team members, and I find it very rewarding to help people advance in their careers. Collaboration is something I truly enjoy, especially when we're focused on enhancing our quality practices. My passions are about people and quality - which also aligns perfectly with Auror.

Outside of work, I enjoy an active lifestyle. I play football during the winter and participate in organised running events in the summer. I also like DIY projects, gardening, and I love getting outdoors with my dog.

Check out my LinkedIn here.

Requirements

About you:

You bring deep expertise in quality engineering, automation, and modern testing practices, and you use that expertise to lift others and drive meaningful change across teams. You think strategically about how to scale quality in complex systems and have the technical breadth to make that strategy real.

As a Staff Quality Engineer, your impact is through others. You enable teams, connect practices across streams without forcing uniformity, and scaling quality engineering capability across Engineering. The scope is board, so this list isn’t exhaustive, but you will thrive if you:

• Excel in automation: You design, implement, and maintain scalable test automation frameworks using Playwright and other tools. Not just for UI but across web, API, and data platforms, enabling faster, more reliable feedback loops.
• Coding experience: You’ll have some coding experience (e.g. in Javascript or Python) to create or extend automated tests, CI/CD scripts and tooling solutions. 
• Embrace emerging technologies: You explore and apply AI-assisted testing, intelligent test case generation, and advanced analytics to evolve our testing approaches.
• Understand systems end-to-end: You bring a broad understanding of architecture, CI/CD pipelines, observability, and deployment practices to improve how we build, test, and release software.
• Advocate for continuous improvement: You identify systemic issues in testing, tooling, or process, and drive long-term, sustainable solutions that improve scalability and reliability.
• Collaborate with impact: You influence design and technical direction by bringing a quality lens to early conversations, aligning teams on pragmatic, high impact solutions. Preventing defects rather than catching them.
• Drive adoption through ownership: You take proactive ownership of quality initiatives, leading through alignment rather than authority. You create shared understanding around quality vision and see initiatives through to adoption across teams.
• Navigate ambiguity with initiative: You thrive in undefined problem spaces, scoping and executing quality initiatives without waiting for detailed direction.
• Scale quality practices: You standardise patterns when it makes sense, set up reusable frameworks, and share approaches beyond your immediate stream to lift quality capability organisation wide.
• Coach and enable others: You lift the capability of engineers around you, sharing your expertise in automation, performance, and quality strategy.
• Communicate with clarity: You tailor your message for different audiences, proactively sharing insights, context, and recommendations that improve outcomes.
• Stay hands-on and curious: You balance strategy with execution, keeping close to the code, tools, and data that inform sound engineering decisions.

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.

Benefits

• Competitive salary Range: Depending on level of experience of IC4 ($127,000- $150,000NZD)

• 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.
• Health Care Plan: In partnership with Nib, Auror covers 100% of the cost of your individual health insurance plan.
• 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 three expert sessions paid for every year.
• Family-friendly: We offer comprehensive parental leave and benefits for primary and non-primary caregivers, including a baby bonus and meals delivered to your door.
• 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.

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.