Halter enables farmers to grow and graze more grass through the use of virtual fencing. Every farm is deployed with communication infrastructure, a collar for each animal, and is paired with a mobile application. The result is tens of hours of labour saving per week, improved animal welfare, and increased productivity and sustainability of the land.
To continue to deliver on this mission we are looking for a principal backend engineer to own the backend discipline across our full engineering team.
With Halter's system now serving hundreds of thousands of devices in the field, and spanning 30 engineers across five teams serving three core capabilities; virtual fencing and remote shifting, mating and behaviour monitoring, and pasture management, we need to make sure we have the right ways of working in place to enable aligned but distributed collaboration, progress in our practices, and accountability to an ever-increasing quality bar.
This role is hands-on with an expectation of deep domain understanding, strong technical expertise, and a high level of communication and collaboration to enable aligned results. This will require contribution across the entire technical stack, from the mobile code on the user's phone to our backend systems, all the way to firmware running on the collar. This will see a high level of collaboration, working intimately with each of our product teams to solve hard problems with elegant solutions.
Additionally, this role has responsibility for, in combination with our product teams, the reliability and availability of our technical stack as we expand into new markets globally, including technical feasibility planning and coordination of platform-level changes.
As part of all of this, you will work in a modern technology stack favouring Kotlin and Go on AWS but extending to C++ on our collar, Typescript in our mobile repos, Python for data, and an array of carefully selected open-source services to stitch everything in between.
In doing the above successfully you’ll help develop technology that farmers rely on daily to monitor their pasture and protect their livestock, directly impacting farming practices worldwide.
Who we’re looking for
- Someone who is extremely motivated, wants their work to matter and is not afraid to push hard to help Halter achieve its mission
- You’ll love working as part of a high-performing team with high ownership and high accountability
- You Prioritise understanding the complexity of the domain and have the ability to build deep empathy with our farmers
- Someone who is deeply experienced in the backend discipline with a love for solving hard problems and the know-how to scale a system to millions of end users. You are able to work in any technical stack but ideally have experience in AWS and Kubernetes, and have used Kotlin and/or Go at scale.
- Someone who is unphased by large codebases and even larger problem spaces
- You’ll thrive in ambiguity and don’t mind working with evolving requirements and perform at your best with high levels of ownership and accountability.
- A strong communicator that defaults to transparency and openness in decision-making while also being decisive to enable consistent momentum
- A team player that values collaboration, drives the team’s performance and excels in giving and receiving feedback
- Understands the importance of the Halter system as part of any farming business and holds the quality bar to 24/7 reliability and availability
What your day could look like
- Hands-on coding to deliver high-quality and reliable software across the full technical stack
- The definition of the patterns and practices we follow as an organisation in combination with the wider team
- Abstraction of common patterns for reuse and redistribution across other teams such that time solving problems can be leveraged by other teams
- Proactive identification, planning and prioritisation of future scaling issues or blockers as we go from hundreds of thousands to millions of devices in the field over the next couple years
- Mentorship and knowledge sharing to ensure that the improvements to our system are enabled by more than just yourself
- Deep diving hard technical problems with different domain teams
- Mentoring and coaching fellow engineers
- Lead and contribute to cross-functional brainstorming and design sessions
- Lead cross-functional projects
- Identify, fix and prevent problems as you maintain our backend systems
- Be a part of our 24/7 on-call support roster
- Implement improved engineering practices
Why our team loves working at Halter ❤️
- Dedicate yourself to solving real-world problems alongside an epic team in a culture designed around growth.
- A genuine and shared connection to our mission to make a difference in the world.
- The pride of joining an iconic New Zealand technology company. The excitement, risk, and reward of a high-growth technology scale-up on the global stage.
- Our ideas are truly valued, we are able to move fast, and our impact is real.
- State-of-the-art, dog-friendly office that’s been thoughtfully designed right in the heart of Auckland city. Did we mention dogs and cows?
- Healthy body, healthy mind. We’re partnered with Southern Cross Health Insurance to support your well-being.
- We offer 6 months of fully paid parental leave for primary caregivers, 4 weeks of fully paid secondary caregiver leave and many other parental benefits that support you and your family.
- Our personal growth is important. Halter offers an annual $1000 self-development budget to be used for anything that fuels personal growth.
- Our time to recharge is valued, we’re offered wellness leave and unlimited paid annual leave.
- We offer an inclusive and attractive remuneration package made up of salary, benefits and an employee stock ownership plan.
- Delicious snacks and drinks are available for your daily flow.
Our Office First Approach
There’s a reason you visit your friends in person, live with your family and don’t do dinners over Zoom. Humans are wired for connection. We believe a world-class, in-person office culture is the best way for high-performing teams.
Being office first is a core pillar of our culture. We believe in-person connections are key to driving your own growth, learning, impact, and building genuine long-lasting relationships. Strong relationships make it easier to disagree, give feedback, and do meaningful and aligned work. We don’t like having heaps of rules or policies, but this means having strong, trusted relationships is critical.
We’re office first, not office only. This means working from the office everyday is our default setting, but we flex when we need to. We have a high-trust culture, so everyone is trusted to do what’s best for Halter.
Our office vibe is something special, it’s hard to describe until you’re here, but people at Halter who have come from fully remote or hybrid companies say they could never go back - the high energy and spectacular people they are now surrounded by everyday makes work so enjoyable. Your growth, your learning and your impact is truly unlimited here, and a big part of that comes from being together solving problems, innovating, building context, and constantly learning from each other.
About Halter
At Halter, we’re on a mission to enable farmers and graziers to run the most productive and sustainable operations. Our customers are using Halter to break free from the time-intensive constraints of conventional practices. Imagine watching 500 cattle stand up and walk calmly towards their next break? No quad bikes, no dogs, no fences. Just a group of cattle walking at their own pace. People say it looks like magic. Our customers are revolutionizing grazing with Halter. It's changing lives and transforming an industry. People join Halter to do meaningful work. By joining us you’ll be solving challenging problems within a talented team and a culture built for high performance. Our team out-think, out-work and out-care. We’re committed to delivering real change in the world - this isn’t easy, and in truth, we love that it’s hard. We’re backed to deliver on a mission that matters by Tier 1 investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, DCVC, Blackbird, Promus Ventures, Rocket Lab’s Peter Beck and Icehouse ventures.
To find out more, visit our careers website, LinkedIn & Instagram.
Join our team
Halter is committed to promoting a diverse and inclusive workplace — a place where we can each be ourselves and do the best work of our lives. Research shows that while men apply to jobs when they meet an average of 60% of the requirements, women and under-represented groups of candidates tend to only apply when they meet every requirement. If you think you have what it takes but don’t necessarily tick every requirement on this job description, please still get in touch and apply to Halter. We’d love to chat to see if you’ll be an epic fit!
If this opportunity sounds like you, please apply below by sending through your cover letter explaining why you’re excited about this role and working at Halter, along with your CV, and we’ll be in touch!
Please also feel free to check out the careers page for more information on working at Halter and don't forget to follow us on LinkedIn & Instagram.
