Technical Lead ML Engineer / Data Scientist

Permanent role: Starting as soon as a candidate is available.

Location: Based in our office on Karangahape Road in Auckland, New Zealand, with the option to work remotely two days per week. We value regular face-to-face communication while also offering flexibility to work from home some days of the week.

We will consider visa sponsorship for this role for exceptional candidates applying from outside of New Zealand.

Salary: Competitive salary commensurate with skills and experience.

About Narrative:

Narrative is one of NZ’s fastest-growing software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies. We build products that cater to a market of millions of professional photographers worldwide. Our AI-powered tools help professional photographers from more than 160 countries improve their photo selection and photo editing workflows, significantly increasing their productivity. With the backing of top-tier Venture Capitalists – including Founders Fund – and a team of exceptionally talented staff, we are committed to driving innovation in this space.

We have many thousands of photographers using our products, and our AI processes more than 2+ billion images from photographers annually.

We have a strong, nurturing company culture at Narrative. You'll join a smart, friendly, and supportive team with psychological safety. Here, we can be our authentic selves, freely discuss ideas, make the best decisions, and do our best work.

For more about Narrative and our culture, visit: https://narrative.so/careers

Some of the things you will work on:

• Technical Leadership (reporting directly to the Head of AI)
• Collaborate with the Head of AI and other senior leaders to shape our ML and Data Science strategic roadmap
• Facilitate clear communication and decision-making within the AI team and across departments
• Contribute to a positive team culture, supporting and developing team members at all levels
• Establish and maintain technical best practices
  
• Model Creation & Analytics
• Tackle interesting, intricate, interdisciplinary technical challenges
• Design, train, optimise, and deploy innovative Computer Vision ML models
• Build ideal training, validation, and test datasets
• Execute ML training on large-scale image and categorical datasets
• Analyse user data to identify patterns to enhance model accuracy
• Work with a data labelling team to continuously refine training data
  
• Data Pipelines and Data Warehousing
• Create and maintain efficient ML data pipelines 
• Run batch processing data transformations in our data warehouse

We’re looking for someone who has:

• Attitude
• A self-directed problem solver who enjoys diving deep into gnarly challenges
• Ability to integrate feedback and expertise from diverse technical and non-technical sources
• A collaborative, egoless mindset, always ready to help and celebrate others’ successes
• Enthusiasm to work on some Data Engineering tasks, knowing it’s key to our overall success
• Excitement about impacting and changing the lives of photographers and shaping the future of photography
• Ability to be scrappy and build imperfect solutions quickly and then improve them over time
  
• Skills & experience
• 5+ years of industry experience
• Fantastic communication skills 
• Expertise in building and improving custom Computer Vision ML models in PyTorch or TensorFlow
• Understanding of how to improve data quality to improve ML model accuracy
• Experience with distributed ML training across multiple GPUs
• Excellent coding skills in Python
• Experience working with SQL, NoSQL, or Graph databases
• Proven ability to conduct novel research, leveraging academic research 
  
• Education
• PhD or Master’s degree in Data Science, Computer Science, Software Engineering, Mathematics; or equivalent experience
• First-principles understanding of CNN and Transformer neural network architectures

Handy to have, but not required:

• A keen interest in photography
• Familiarity with photo editing tools like Adobe Lightroom or similar applications
• Knowledge of Databricks, Snowflake, or similar
• Knowledge of Rust or C/C++
• AWS certification

• Extended paid parental leave in addition to government leave with reduced working hours at full pay for new parents, depending on how long you've been at Narrative
• Extended sick leave to support our team through life’s challenges
• Generous Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP)
• Access to borrow professional camera gear for creative projects
• Support for professional growth through meet-ups, training, and mentorship

At Narrative, we're building AI software to help a wide range of people. We're looking for a team that shares our passion for this work. Research shows that some candidates apply when they meet about 60% of the criteria, while others hesitate unless they meet them all. If you're excited about joining Narrative and eager to grow, go ahead and apply, even if you don't check every box.

If this sounds like you, please apply with a CV and well-written cover letter. Please also tell us your visa status.