Lead Software Engineer

This role requires you to relocate to Auckland, New Zealand. We will provide visa and relocation support.

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 Founders Fund, Bessemer Venture Partners, BOND, DCVC, Blackbird, Promus Ventures, Rocket Lab’s Peter Beck and Icehouse ventures.

To find out more, visit our LinkedIn & Instagram.

At Halter, we know how much farmers care - for their animals and their pasture. But the tools they rely on haven’t kept up, and we’re on a mission to change that. Halter helps farmers make smarter decisions - fast. We reckon good pasture management is the key to more productive and sustainable farms. More grass. Healthier soil. Happier animals. And more time back for the people doing the work.

About the role

We're looking for Lead Engineers who perform at the top of the craft. You'll take on the hardest problems, make the calls that matter on the gnarliest design questions, and ship work that the rest of the team learns from. Engineers around you get better because they're working alongside you. We don't mind whether your strengths sit on the frontend, backend, full stack, or on the platform side that gives every other engineer leverage. What matters is that you ship robust, thoughtful work at a level few others can match, and use AI tools well.

The kind of problems our teams solve

Halter is one system: hardware, software, and AI, running live on real farms. Our engineering teams own different slices of that system, but the problems all rhyme:

• Turning thousands of collars and billions of sensor events into a single, calm decision in a farmer's hand.
• Modelling the physical world (animals, pasture, terrain) accurately enough to act on in real time.
• Building mobile and web experiences that hold up at 5am whilst out in a paddock in the rain.
• Designing platforms and pipelines that scale with our incredible pace of growth without the seams showing.
• Engineering against constrained hardware, flaky rural connectivity, and the messiness of the physical world, and shipping with pace despite it.

What you'll do

• Take on the hardest problems and ship the work that proves them out.
• Make the architectural calls that matter, then back them up by writing the code.
• Set the standard for thoughtful engineering: clean, observable, easy-to-evolve code and systems.
• Support and mentor other engineers through design conversations, code reviews, and generous context sharing.
• Help set the pace and quality bar for engineering at Halter.
• Help evolve our testing strategies, CI/CD workflows, and infrastructure patterns.
• Own the reliability and performance of your domain, especially when things get tricky. Every team owns its services end-to-end, with an on-call rotation.
• Get out on farm. Deep domain knowledge matters, and you'll be expected to develop it.

You’ll be great if you:

• Have spent years shipping complex systems in production and have the experience (and scars) to show for it.
• Stay calm under pressure, have a low ego, and can rally a team through tough or complex work.
• Think like a product engineer: you care about the customer experience, not just clean code.
• Know how to use AI tools well to lift team output and focus on the harder stuff.
• Have grown other engineers by working alongside them, not by managing them.
• Are comfortable in fast-moving, ambiguous environments where adaptability beats perfection.
• Have worked in cloud environments. AWS is a bonus.
• A degree in software engineering (or equivalent) is nice to have, but not essential.

Depending on where you sit on the stack, some of these will land harder than others:

• Frontend / Mobile: strong UX intuition, modern frontend frameworks (React, React Native a bonus), an eye for performance and polish on real devices.
• Backend: building and scaling