Machine Learning Engineer

The Company

Herd-i is a Christchurch-based Agritech company building AI products for dairy farmers. Its camera-based locomotion scoring system uses computer vision to assess cow health from video, giving farmers an early read on lameness and herd performance, and it’s in use on commercial dairy farms. It’s a growing team of around 20 in Christchurch, with software engineers, testers, DevOps and commercial staff working alongside a dedicated Machine Learning team.

The Role

We are seeking a Machine Learning Engineer to join Herd-i’s machine learning team of four, reporting to the Lead Machine Learning Engineer. You will improve the accuracy of the computer vision models behind the product, with a focus on early illness detection, and strengthen the MLOps pipeline that trains, deploys and monitors them. This is a hands-on role for someone who takes ownership. You’ll be trusted with real parts of the pipeline and workload and expected to run with them.

What You’ll Be Doing

• Developing, optimising and maintaining production models, including cow detection, keypoint detection and regression models for scoring
• Designing and implementing MLOps pipelines for automated training, deployment and performance monitoring
• Conducting data preprocessing, feature engineering and rigorous model evaluation
• Improving the accuracy of cow identification and detection, with a focus on early illness detection
• Working with the CTO, software developers and client-facing staff to turn business needs into production-ready AI solutions
• Supporting other developers, including code reviews, and keeping across advances in machine learning that can improve the product

Skills and Experience We’re Looking For

• A bachelor’s degree or above in Computer Science, Data Science, Machine Learning or a related field (a relevant Master’s or PhD is highly desirable)
• 1-2 years’ commercial experience developing and deploying machine learning models into production
• Strong Python skills, with deep learning experience in PyTorch or TensorFlow
• Computer vision experience, including object detection (e.g. RT-DETR, YOLO) and keypoint detection
• Experience with regression and tree-based models (such as XGBoost) for scoring and prediction
• Practical understanding of MLOps, including CI/CD, containerisation (Docker) and cloud services
• The ability to explain technical concepts clearly to non-technical colleagues
• Advantageous: agricultural or dairy experience, data visualisation, large-scale data processing

What’s On Offer

• The chance to apply computer vision to a real animal-health problem and own its end-to-end commercial application
• A collaborative, modern work environment in Christchurch, in a growing team with plenty of room to take ownership
• Genuine technical autonomy and defined pathways for career growth

This is an on-site role in Christchurch, and you must have the right to work in New Zealand. To find out more or to have a confidential discussion, apply now.