Senior 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 for two days a week. We find it’s important to have time for face-to-face communication, while also allowing some days to work from home, if one wants.

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, plus participation in a generous employee share option scheme.

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. 

See https://narrative.so/careers for more info about Narrative and our culture.

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.

Some of the things you will work on:

• Model Creation & Analytics
• Designing, training, modifying, validating, optimising and deploying novel ML models in the Computer Vision space
• Craft the best training, validation, and test datasets for our models
• Conducting statistical analysis to identify user data patterns and behaviours to improve our models’ accuracy
• Working with a Data Labelling team to refine our training data
• Data Pipelines and Data Warehousing
• Creating and maintaining ML data pipelines 
• Batch processing of data in our data warehouse
• Diverse Engineering Challenges
• Solving really intricate technical challenges
• Working with large datasets of labelled and unlabelled data
• Communicating with marketing, product, engineering, and AI to determine the best approach to solving multi-disciplinary problems

Requirements

We’re looking for someone who has:

• Attitude
• Self-directed skilled problem solver who can independently and proactively work towards solving the most gnarly technically challenging problems
• Ability to communicate across teams, integrating feedback and expertise from diverse technical and non-technical sources
• Enthusiasm to work on Data Engineering tasks, as necessary, recognising their essential role in the team's overall success
• Desire to take feedback and always improve themselves
• Excitement about impacting and changing the lives of photographers and shaping the future of photography
• Curiosity to learn and understand things deeply and completely
• Ability to be scrappy and build imperfect solutions quickly and then improve them over time
• Skills & experience
• 5+ years of industry experience
• Excellent coding skills in Python
• Fantastic communication skills 
• Expertise in building custom Computer Vision ML models in PyTorch or TensorFlow
• Understanding of how to tune and optimise ML models by improving model structure and training data
• Experience with querying data from SQL, NoSQL, or Graph databases
• Ability to read, interpret and implement findings from academic research papers
• Proven ability to conduct novel research, particularly in the fields of image processing, mathematical modelling, algorithms, and deep learning
• Education
• Master’s degree or PhD in Data Science, Computer Science, Software Engineering, Mathematics, or a similar field; or experience equivalent to this
• Deep knowledge of Data Science and Statistics tools and principles

Handy to have, but not required:

• A keen interest in photography
• Knowledge of Snowflake, Databricks, or similar
• Knowledge of Rust or C/C++
• AWS certification

Benefits

• 1 month of paid parental leave in addition to government leave, 30 hours a week for 6 months on full pay following return from parental leave (for all parents)
• Extended sick leave to support our team through the many challenges life can throw our way
• Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP)

At Narrative, we are committed to developing AI software that serves people of all ethnicities, genders, and religious backgrounds. We want our team to reflect this commitment. Research indicates that some men apply to jobs when they meet around 60% of the criteria, while women and other underrepresented individuals often only apply if they meet all the criteria. So, if you really love the idea of working at Narrative and have a strong desire to learn and improve, please apply, even if you don't tick every box in the job description.

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