Lead Software Engineer - Platform

Halter; Auckland; On-site; NZD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Personal growth fund

Job summary

Halter is seeking a Lead Engineer for our Platform team to set the direction for building, running, and evolving the systems that power our global cattle-tracking platform. You will lead critical infrastructure initiatives and enable engineering teams to move fast with reliability.

You will mentor engineers across backend, embedded, ML and data, own cloud infrastructure decisions, and elevate security, observability, and reliability so teams can innovate without friction.

Qualifications

• Deep experience building and operating AWS at scale.
• Led platform or infrastructure work in a high-growth environment.
• Backend product development experience is a plus.
• Strong developer experience and golden paths.
• Security as a first-class part of platform engineering.
• Interested in how AI tooling can change engineering workflows.
• Observability and debugging at scale.
• Strong communicator and leader.
• Comfortable navigating ambiguity.

Responsibilities

• Drive AI tooling adoption across the org.
• Build tooling, guardrails, and golden paths for engineers.
• Set technical direction for cloud infrastructure at scale.
• Bake security into the platform with guardrails and defaults.
• Maintain core compute and orchestration layer reliability.
• Advance observability and incident tooling.
• Automate infrastructure via IaC, CI/CD, and internal tools.
• Lead cross-functional architecture discussions.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews and technical sessions.
• Participate in on-call rotation.

Skills

Leadership

Platform engineering

Backend development

Developer experience

Security by design

Observability

Communication

Ambiguity tolerance

Collaboration

Tools

AWS

Container orchestration

IaC

CI/CD

Cloud networking

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.

About The Role

At Halter, our platform is what turns ambitious engineering into farmer and rancher impact. Every collar on every cow, every grazing break a farmer or rancher sets, and every alert a vet acts on depends on infrastructure that’s reliable, secure, and easy for our engineers to build on. As Halter grows globally and our systems handle billions of daily events from the paddock, the platform underneath needs to scale with us without slowing anyone down.

We’re looking for a Lead Engineer to join our Platform team to set the direction for how we build, run, and evolve the systems that everything else at Halter sits on. You'll combine deep technical expertise with the leadership to shape how a fast-growing engineering organisation thinks about cloud infrastructure, developer experience, security, and AI-assisted engineering.

Day-to-day you'll partner closely with engineering teams across the business, including backend, embedded, ML, and data, to make sure the platform accelerates their velocity rather than gating it. Whether it's evolving our internal AI tooling into something the whole org relies on, building golden paths that make the right thing the easy thing, hardening our cloud security posture, or keeping our collar-to-cloud pipeline rock-solid as we scale, you'll own problems end-to-end. If you want your work to multiply the impact of every other engineer at Halter, this is the role.

What You'll Do

• Drive how Halter leverages AI tooling to accelerate development. We've already invested in internal AI infrastructure that engineers rely on day-to-day, and you'll evolve it from an engineering-team tool into something the whole org leans on. You'll own the adoption patterns, the guardrails, and the force-multiplier use cases, from automated CI-failure triage to PR review bots to AI-summarised build notifications.
• Build out the tooling, guardrails, and golden paths that make it easy for other engineers to ship safely and quickly. The right paved roads multiply every engineer's impact, and you'll shape where ours go next.
• Set the technical direction for our cloud infrastructure as Halter scales globally, making the architecture decisions that balance velocity, cost, reliability, and operational simplicity.
• Bake security into the platform through guardrails and sensible defaults, so the secure path is also the easy path for every team. You'll set the direction across IAM, network policy, secrets management, and supply chain.
• Keep our core compute and orchestration layer reliable at the scale farmers and ranchers depend on, day in and day out.
• Drive observability and incident tooling forward, treating on-call as a signal rather than a cost. Engineers should be able to detect, diagnose, and resolve issues before they reach farmers and ranchers.
• Automate infrastructure management through Infrastructure-as-Code, CI/CD pipelines, and internal tooling that reduces operational load over time.
• Lead cross-functional architecture discussions and help define and evolve platform practices and standards across the organisation, balancing pragmatic delivery with long-term maintainability.
• Mentor and grow other engineers through design conversations, code reviews, and generous context sharing.
• Be part of an on-call rotation, working with a highly skilled team to resolve incidents and put preventative measures in place.

Who We're Looking For

• You have deep experience building and operating AWS at scale, with strong fluency in container orchestration, cloud networking, and Infrastructure-as-Code.
• You've led platform or infrastructure work in a high-growth environment, and you're comfortable setting direction across multiple teams.
• Backend product development experience is a plus, since it helps you understand how engineers build products and what they need from the platform underneath them.
• You understand what good developer experience looks like, and you've built golden paths, paved roads, or internal platforms that engineers reach for instead of rolling their own.
• You treat security as a first-class part of platform engineering, not an afterthought, and have hands-on experience hardening cloud environments.
• You're excited about how AI tooling can change the way engineering teams work, and you have a point of view on where it adds leverage versus where it adds risk. Bonus if you've built an AI agent or AI-assisted tooling in production. We have internal AI infrastructure of our own, and we'll want your point of view on where it goes next.
• You understand how to build systems that are observable, testable, and easy to debug at scale.
• You're a strong communicator who leads through influence, aligning teams around shared goals, raising the bar on practices, and championing reliability across the organisation.
• You embrace ambiguity. At Halter, the biggest platform problems rarely come with a clear spec. You're comfortable navigating uncertainty and making pragmatic calls.
• You're a highly effective collaborator who lifts the people around you through clear communication, generous knowledge sharing, and a low ego.
• Importantly, we're looking for someone who is passionate about what they do, motivated by impact, and eager to keep learning.

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 be 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!"