Device Performance Engineer

Alt; Auckland; On-site; NZD 110,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Personal growth fund

Job summary

Halter seeks a Device Systems Engineer to guide device development, optimize power and performance in real-world farming environments, and turn data into action. You’ll explore how sensors, radios and batteries behave in the field, and apply first-principles reasoning to close performance gaps.

You’ll work across firmware, hardware and data teams, ensuring insights drive product revisions and measurable improvements on farm scale.

Qualifications

• Deep curiosity about how things actually work.
• First-principles thinking; reason from physical reality rather than patterns.
• Ownership and follow-through; turn findings into real fleet improvements.
• Engineering science or quantitative technical background with real-world problem solving.
• Strong data analysis skills; clean, filter and validate noisy data in Python.

Responsibilities

• Analyse collar performance at fleet scale: power consumption, battery life, GPS and sensor behaviour across tens of millions of devices.
• Build a ground-truth understanding of how the product is used on farm and how that differs from design assumptions.
• Wrangle large, messy datasets to find signal in the noise and distinguish real effects from data quality artefacts.
• Reason from first principles about sensor, radio and battery limits to identify physics vs firmware vs usage gaps.
• Translate field insights into scoping and design of new products and hardware revisions.
• Communicate findings clearly to firmware, hardware and product teams and drive action.
• See improvements through from insight to production with engineering teams.

Skills

Python

Data analysis

First principles

Firmware knowledge

Hardware knowledge

Communication skills

Education

Engineering background

Tools

SQL

Pandas

Job description

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’re on a mission to enable farmers and graziers to run the most productive and sustainable operations in the world. Our customers use Halter to break free from the time-intensive constraints of conventional farming. Imagine 500 cattle standing up and walking calmly to their next break. No quad bikes, no dogs, no fences, just a herd moving at its own pace. People say it looks like magic. Underneath it is a fleet of tens of 1 million (and growing rapidly) collars, each one a small physical system balancing power, radios, sensors and firmware, all operating on a live animal, in the real world, at scale.

We're looking for a Device Systems Engineer to help guide the development of our devices to extract the absolute best performance for our customers. This is a role for someone who wants to build a genuinely deep understanding of the product in the wild: where power gets spent, where the physical world doesn't match the assumptions in the design, and where there's real headroom to do better. You'll spend your time in the data, but the point isn't the data itself. It's the insight it gives you into a physical system, and the improvements you can drive because of it.

This role sits at the intersection of firmware, hardware, comms and data. You'll need to be equally comfortable wrangling a massive, noisy, real-world dataset and reasoning from first principles about what a sensor or a radio can and can't actually do. And critically, you won't just hand off a finding. You'll see it through: forming the hypothesis, proving it in data, working out what to change, and following it into production.

Our team out-thinks, out-works and out-cares. We're committed to delivering real change in the world. This isn't easy, and honestly, we love that it's hard.

What you'll be doing

• Analyse collar performance at fleet scale: power consumption, battery life, GPS and sensor behaviour, across tens of millions of devices operating in wildly different real-world conditions.

• Build a deep, ground-truth understanding of how the product is actually used on farm, and how that differs from how we assumed it would be used when we designed it.

• Wrangle large, messy, real-world datasets (fleet telemetry, logs, field data) to find the signal in the noise, and know the difference between a genuine effect and a data quality artefact.

• Reason from first principles about the physical limitations of sensors, radios and batteries, so you can tell when a performance gap is a physics problem, a firmware problem, or a usage pattern problem.

• Bring your ground-truth understanding of real-world device performance into the scoping and design of new products and hardware revisions. Your view of what actually happens in the field, not just what happens on the bench, will be critical to the whole team arriving at the best possible product.

• Communicate findings clearly to firmware, hardware and product teams, translating deep technical analysis into something people can actually act on and prioritise.

• See improvements through from insight to production: working with engineering teams to implement, validate and confirm the change actually delivered what the data said it would.

What you'll bring

• Deep curiosity about how things actually work, and the patience to dig until you genuinely understand it.

• Genuine first-principles thinking. You default to reasoning about a system from how it actually works physically, rather than pattern-matching to what usually works.

• A bias to ownership and follow-through. You're not satisfied with an interesting finding; you want to see it become a real improvement in the fleet.

• An engineering science, physics, or similarly quantitative technical background, with a track record of applying it to real, messy, physical-world problems.

• Strong data analysis skills; comfortable working with large real-world datasets in Python or similar, including cleaning, filtering and validating noisy data before trusting any conclusion drawn from it.

• Strong communication skills, able to explain technical findings clearly to engineers across disciplines and get people aligned on what to do about it.

Bonus points for

• Genuine curiosity about farming, animal welfare, or hardware that has to survive outdoors, unattended, on a live animal. We can teach the domain, but the curiosity has to be there already.

• Experience in statistics, or applied maths.

• Experience working on optimisation problems, not just analysing from the outside.

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 candidates tend to only apply when they meet every single one.

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.

Why our team loves working at Halter:

• Work that genuinely matters. Every now and again a company comes along that transforms an entire industry and leaves the world in a better place. Our team gets to be part of something truly meaningful, helping farmers improve their livelihoods, spend more time with their families, and build more sustainable operations.

• Spectacular people solving hard problems. Our culture is designed for talented people to do work that changes lives. The team is filled with diverse, kind, and driven people who push each other to do their best work. You'll have thrown into the deep end, tackling complex challenges and building something tangible that solves real problems.

• You’ll grow here. Autonomy, mastery, and learning define how we work. You'll have the freedom to work on interesting problems, master new skills, and continuously develop yourself, both through your role and our $1,000 personal growth fund.

• This isn't easy, and we love that it's hard. Working at Halter will be the most rewarding and the most challenging work of your life. We move fast, take bold bets, and work hard to reshape an entire industry. As one team member put it: "Joining Halter is a bit like strapping yourself to a rocket ship, but it's an epic journey to be a part of!"