laingc

Starboard Maritime Intelligence | Agentic AI Engineer | Wellington, New Zealand | Full-time | On-Site

Starboard builds mission-critical intelligence platforms for the defence, national security, and maritime enforcement sectors. Our software fuses complex datasets—including satellite imagery (SAR/EO), vessel tracking (AIS), and proprietary intelligence to help our customers identify and respond to illicit and threatening activities at sea. We work on challenges like sanctions evasion, illegal fishing, and maritime security operations.

We are seeking our first Agentic AI Engineer to pioneer a new capability within the company. This is a foundational role with significant autonomy, responsible for designing and building an "AI Agent Workforce" from the ground up. Your objective will be to leverage agentic AI to enhance operational effectiveness and accelerate the intelligence cycle across our business—from engineering to analysis. This is a hands-on-keyboard role focused on deploying robust, auditable, and secure AI systems, not just theoretical research.

Example responsibilities:

- Develop agents to automate the initial analysis of raw data streams, generating draft intelligence summaries for our analyst teams.

- Build agents to assist with static code analysis, security vulnerability scanning, or triaging failures in our secure deployment pipelines.

- Create agents to perform real-time horizon scanning, monitoring multiple data feeds to flag and contextualise key maritime events.

- Establish the company-wide standards, tooling, and security frameworks for the development and deployment of all AI agents.

We're looking for someone with:

- Demonstrable, hands-on experience building functional AI agent systems. This can be from professional, academic, or personal projects.

- Proficiency in Python.

- A deep-seated curiosity for emerging AI technologies and a systematic approach to experimentation.

- An understanding of how to apply technology to solve concrete business and operational problems, with a strong sense of ownership.

IMPORTANT - SECURITY REQUIREMENTS: Due to the nature of our work with government defence and intelligence partners, this role has strict security clearance requirements. To be eligible, you MUST have been a citizen of the UK, USA, Canada, New Zealand, or Australia for at least 10 years. We regret that we cannot make exceptions to this.

If you are interested in applying your AI skills to critical national security and intelligence challenges, we would love to hear from you.

Apply here: https://www.seek.co.nz/job/85965176

For those interested in a high-level walk through of the Anglo-Saxon period, I highly recommend “The Anglo-Saxons: A History of the Beginnings of England” by Marc Morris. It covers the period from a number of different perspectives, including a clerical/monastic one that is easy to underestimate and ignore with a modern secular bias.

There is also a very listen-able audiobook version available on Audible.

Because memes aren't allowed on HN, you're not allowed to reply with the "akssshuallllyyy" meme, so you had to go to these lengths.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Very helpful answer, thank you!

What's the current state-of-the-art in deploying large, "self-hosted" models to scalable infrastructure? (e.g. AWS or k8s)

Example use case would be to support a web application with, say, 100k DAU.

That is simply not correct. With properly implemented E2EE, you can communicate confidently over a completely insecure channel. You could post the entire data stream publicly on the internet with no loss of privacy.

I replied with what the thing is called, explained what it can be used for, and recommended an introductory text to learn more.

If you can come up with a more helpful reply in as many words, then please do so.

> but those operations over what usually appears at the denominator of the derivative purely for notation purpose has always looked to me as complete magical garbage.

You will be delighted to discover that they are in fact not magical or garbage.

> What object is "dx" ? is it a number ? a limit ? is it zero ? can i divide another number by it ?

dx is a differential one-form. You can think of it as a generalisation of a gradient, if you like. These are very important in Differential Geometry.

You can use differential forms to do all sorts of things, but one example you may be familiar with is to compute area or volume forms over arbitrary manifolds. It gets a bit hard to define things on HN without TeX support, but using differential one-forms and the related exterior derivative, you can define a generalised Stokes' theorem that works for any smooth, oriented manifold.

I used this in my PhD, and implemented it directly in a numerical method, so this has very practical engineering uses also.

"Elementary Differential Geometry" by Barrett O'Neill is a pretty beginner-friendly introduction to some of these topics if you're interested, though there are many other good texts also.

As the father of two young daughters, I adore Bluey. Quite apart from how good the episodes are for adults, I really enjoy the following aspects:

1. It portrays wholesome and positive family relationships, particularly between father and daughters. The girls are also good to one another, with occasional conflict kindly and realistically resolved.

2. It tells simple stories without pushing political messages. Unfortunately, children’s television at large has become another victim of the culture wars, with heavy-handed social messages infecting what should be simple cartoons. Bluey is something I can trust.

3. I don’t have to expose my kids to American accents. They’ll have more than enough of that from regular programming when they grow up.

Doesn’t Airtable more or less do this?

yt-dlp

I am entirely on Meta's side here. They have done a huge amount for open source ML, and with the llama2 license they are enabling millions of small-to-very-large companies with incredibly valuable technology, while asking the hyperscale cloud providers to pay. This is more than reasonable, in my view.

I would like to see more open source technologies taking this kind of licensing view - free for almost everyone, except the frankly parasitic hyperscalers who profit from others' largesse.

I didn’t pick that up, but I suppose that’s fair. I’ve heard both, as I have with Celsius.

To be fair, that is actually common in physics. Elsewhere obviously not so much.

Firstly, agreed totally about identity.

Secondly, signing every message wouldn’t be impractical at all, I don’t think. We’ve had the technology to do this for a long time and it’s very simple. What we don’t have is good key management. For average users, this would have to be something provided by their devices (phone or the Secure Enclave in your Mac or whatever) - managing keys and the web-of-trust shamozzle are the main reasons why encrypted email for everyone never took off.

"I'm lonely!"

"Have a family?"

"Sounds unethical..."

This is an absolutely demented perspective.

Have you considered starting a family?

Thanks for compiling this data. Where did you get it from?

I am genuinely curious about this. I prefer native apps to web apps, but I have notifications disabled for every app I install except those that my wife and parents use to contact me. I’m sure I’m not alone in this behaviour - I hate notifications and any workflow model based around them.

Is my viewpoint very uncommon? Are notifications generally used and loved by users? Do app developers have good stats about this?

Well, no, only if you’re under the jurisdiction of the EU courts. They can rule against you as much as they like, but it’s not enforceable outside of the EU or a jurisdiction that chooses to enforce EU judgements.

Hey Lewis,

I’m pretty interested in learning from your experience - I’ll email you at the address in your profile, if that’s ok?

Used it in its infancy for my PhD work - absolutely loved it, despite its teething problems. Also +1 for Langtangen!

If you’re a working mathematician, it’s the only way you think.

I have tried, through a very good friend who is an artist. She has exhibited at some major galleries in Europe, and I’d say she knows her stuff.

Much as I love my friend, after the exposure I’ve had to modern art I have to agree that it is almost without exception meaningless trash.

Look, let’s just be real for a moment here. Take a step back and ask yourself what’s more likely: that (A) there really is something deep and mysterious about the banana-on-the-wall or (B) most actual artistry disappeared with the invention of photography and modern artists are LARPing, sustained by taxpayer handouts and the financial fumes of the money laundering and tax evasion that high end art is used for.

Modern art is a joke, and everyone including the artists know it.

I have an M1 Air and it's easily the best computer of any kind I've ever owned. The battery life is unmatched by anything else on the market. It's light, cool, and incredibly fast.

Fivetran is absolutely in the category of product that might be in use at NASA. They are a very well-known technology in the data engineering world.

I think GP is conflating Maths with Pure Maths. While I’m sure there is new ground to break in Pure Maths, I would agree that it’s getting harder and harder.

However, as you note, in Applied Maths there are more unsolved problems than you could address with a million researchers.

A physicist or pure Mather social looks at Navier-Stokes and says, “Oh, we know how that works, nothing to do there I guess”, whereas the applied mathematician looks at it and goes, “holy cow, this could keep my entire department busy for the rest of our natural lives”.

That’s exactly right. There’s no market-clearing price because of regulatory distortion. You’re free to like or dislike that as a policy, but it is clear that it removes the information value of the price signal.

I understand that argument, but the very high minimum wage and availability of state support means that in practice there is no market-clearing price for this labour. New Zealanders simply don’t want to do these jobs.

New Zealand does exactly this, and I’m of two minds on it. On the one hand, it seems easy to say that if you don’t have enough workers, you’ve got to raise your price - it’s a free market, right? Except it’s not. NZ has a very generous welfare system (compared to its very small GDP) and this means that being un- or under-employed is a viable option.

On the other hand, the jobs also bring in a lot of money for the islanders who perform them, and the wages are relatively high by international standards due to NZ’s high minimum wage.

We already have a cost of living crisis, and raising the price of fruit and vegetables by removing these visas for seasonal workers seems like it would hurt everyone without helping anyone in particular.