Senior AI Engineer

Icehouseventures; Auckland; On-site; NZD 100,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Flexible working options

Paid parental leave

Employee share option scheme

Job summary

Icehouseventures is looking for a Senior AI Engineer in Auckland, New Zealand. In this role, you'll bridge AI research and production systems, integrating foundation models into a photography platform while collaborating with product and data teams.

The ideal candidate has strong experience with PyTorch, deep learning frameworks, and system programming, and is skilled in building robust ML pipelines.

We offer flexible working options and a competitive salary aligned with your skills and experience.

Qualifications

• Strong hands-on experience with PyTorch.
• Familiarity with ML tooling frameworks like HuggingFace, FAISS.
• Experience integrating ML models into user-facing products.

Responsibilities

• Evaluate and integrate foundation models into production systems.
• Benchmark architectures for efficiency and scalability.
• Collaborate with product team to define ML/AI specifications.
• Build robust data pipelines for large-scale image datasets.
• Optimize models for various deployment environments.

Skills

Software engineering and troubleshooting skills

Deep learning frameworks (e.g. PyTorch)

Vision foundation models

Systems programming languages (e.g. C++, Rust)

Problem-solving skills

Tools

HuggingFace

FAISS

Job description

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, working to significantly reduce their processing time by supporting a better daily workflow with AI powered tools. 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.

Why you'll love working here

We're committed to building products for professional photographers who work with people from all genders, ethnicities, racial and religious backgrounds. We think it’s important that our team reflects the same diverse audience. We're actively working to grow a diverse team and offer:

• Flexible and remote working options
• 1 month paid parental leave in addition to government leave
• 30 hours a week for up to 6 months on full pay following return from parental leave (for both birthing and non-birthing parents)
• Extended sick leave to support our team to get through the many things life can throw your way.
• Based in our office on Karangahape Road in Auckland, New Zealand, with the option to work remotely for three 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.
• Competitive salary commensurate with skills and experience, a 6 monthly review cycle, plus participation in a generous employee share option scheme.

About the AI Engineering Stack

Our AI infrastructure is built on PyTorch, leveraging state-of-the-art foundation models for computer vision tasks. Our team brings deep expertise in on-device inference optimization, enabling efficient deployment across edge environments. For scalable training and cloud inference, we rely on AWS infrastructure. We're also exploring agentic workflows to enhance our AI capabilities beyond single-purpose pipelines.

About the Role

We're seeking a Senior AI Engineer to bridge cutting-edge AI research and production systems. You'll evaluate and integrate state-of-the-art foundation models (vision backbones, multimodal LLMs, generative models) into our photography platform, working closely with product and data science teams to translate requirements into deployable solutions. Your focus will span the full ML lifecycle: benchmarking architectures, building robust data pipelines for large-scale image datasets, optimizing models for cloud and on-device deployment, and ensuring production-grade quality across environments.

The ideal candidate brings strong software engineering fundamentals, as well as deep hands‑on experience with PyTorch and vision foundation models. You're energized by rapidly prototyping research ideas and turning them into scalable product features. Experience with model optimization frameworks, multimodal LLMs, or shipping ML-powered applications is a strong plus.

What You'll Do

• Evaluate and integrate state of the art foundation models (e.g., vision backbone, multimodal LLMs, generative models) into our production systems.
• Benchmark different architectures for efficiency, accuracy, and scalability in real‑world usage.
• Collaborate with the product team to define requirements, and translate them into ML/AI model specifications.
• Collaborate with data scientists to design, train, fine‑tune, and evaluate neural networks tailored to photography and image-data–driven use cases.
• Build robust data and model pipelines for large-scale image datasets.
• Ensure reproducibility, maintainability, and scalability of training and inference workflows.
• Optimize models for deployment across different environments (e.g. cloud, desktop, mobile).
• Support the product engineering team to deploy the models to the target environments.
• Stay on top of advancements in computer vision, multimodal learning, and foundation model ecosystems.
• Rapidly prototype and productionize promising approaches.

About You

Required

• Proven strong software engineering and troubleshooting skills.
• Strong hands‑on experience with deep learning frameworks (e.g. PyTorch) and familiarity with ML tooling frameworks (e.g. HuggingFace, FAISS, etc.).
• Familiarity with vision foundation models and their practical applications.
• Experience in at least one systems programming language (C++, Rust, C, Zig, Go, etc.), or in building ML-powered applications for desktop, mobile, or web environments.
• Strong problem‑solving skills and ability to turn research ideas into robust product features.

Nice to Have

• Experience with large-scale computer vision projects.
• Background in multimodal LLM, especially Vision Language Models.
• Experience with model lowering, quantization, or acceleration frameworks (e.g., ONNX, ExecuTorch, CUDA, CoreML, MLX).
• Experience integrating ML models into user-facing products (desktop apps, mobile apps, or web clients).
• Familiarity with modern data infrastructure (SQL/NoSQL databases, vector databases, cloud object storages).
• Contributions to open-source ML projects or research publications.

Narrative is committed to building AI software that works for people from all genders, ethnicities, racial and religious backgrounds. We want our team to reflect this focus. Research shows that men apply to jobs when they meet an average of 60% of the criteria, while women and other underrepresented individuals tend to only apply when they check every box. So, if you really love the idea of working for Narrative, and think you have what it takes, please apply, even if you do not tick every box in the job description.