Lead Network Engineer - Wireless networks

Halter; Auckland; On-site; NZD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Mesh networking (bonus)

Telemetry systems

Provisioning automation

Job summary

Halter is seeking a Senior Network Engineer to own the performance, reliability, and scalability of our collar and tower network. You will diagnose field issues, design architecture to prevent them, and set technical direction as Halter grows.

This senior, hands-on role expects you to handle gnarliest wireless and infrastructure problems and to lead cross-functional efforts ensuring robust real-time telemetry from devices in the field to the Halter platform.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience designing and operating large-scale wireless networks (LPWAN/LoRa, cellular).
• Ownership of network architecture end-to-end and in production.
• Comfort with RF, tower hardware, edge devices and cloud systems.
• Experience with observability/monitoring for distributed IoT systems.
• Mentored engineers and led through ambiguous, hard problems.
• Willingness to visit farms to understand field performance.

Responsibilities

• Work across technical and commercial teams to translate on-farm connectivity challenges into actionable requirements to improve Halter's IoT network performance.
• Own the operation and optimisation of Halter's collar and tower network, ensuring robust performance, scalability, and minimal downtime.
• Design and evolve the network architecture, focusing on wireless protocols (LoRa), tower infrastructure, edge-to-cloud data flow, and real-time telemetry processing.
• Drive continuous improvement of network health through monitoring, data analysis, and field feedback.
• Lead tower deployment strategy, including site selection, configuration, provisioning automation, and remote management.
• Help set the technical vision for the network discipline alongside technical leaders.
• Collaborate with firmware, backend, and product teams to ensure end-to-end data flow.
• Contribute to cross-functional design discussions ensuring networking considerations are represented in product decisions.
• Own rollout and support of networking tools and diagnostics for multi-terrain operation.
• Mentor fellow engineers and share best practices in wireless networking and high-availability systems.
• Implement observability for network performance via data pipelines and tooling.
• Plan and prioritise work within the Network team for rapid value delivery.
• Stay updated on wireless networking, mesh architectures, spectrum management, and rural connectivity.
• Join on-call rotation to support uptime and incident resolution.
• Other tasks as needed in a fast-paced, mission-driven team.

Skills

LoRa network design

Wireless infrastructure

Network architecture

Observability/monitoring

Mentoring engineers

Field work readiness

Telemetry data pipelines

Edge-to-cloud data flow

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 Team

The Network team owns the wireless backbone that connects every collar to the Halter platform, moving half-a-billion messages between the backend and collars per day! That touches LoRa-based communication protocols, cellular backhaul, the tower network itself, and the edge-to-cloud pipeline that turns radio traffic into real-time telemetry farmers and ranchers can trust. As Halter scales across new farms, regions, and terrain, this network has to scale with it — reliably, because cows don’t take days off.

About the Role

We're looking for a Senior Network Engineer to take ownership of the performance, reliability, and scalability of Halter's collar and tower network. You'll operate at the intersection of wireless communication protocols, tower infrastructure, and real-time data flow — diagnosing issues from the field, designing the architecture that prevents them, and setting the technical direction for how the network evolves as Halter grows.

This is a senior, hands-on technical role. You'll be the person other engineers come to with the gnarliest wireless and infrastructure problems, and you'll be expected to make the calls that matter when it counts.

What You'll Do

• Work across technical and commercial teams to understand on-farm connectivity challenges and translate them into actionable requirements that improve the performance and reliability of Halter's IoT network.

• Take ownership of the operation and optimisation of Halter's collar and tower network, ensuring robust performance, scalability, and minimal downtime.

• Design and evolve the network architecture, with a focus on wireless communication protocols (e.g. LoRa), tower infrastructure, edge-to-cloud data flow, and real-time telemetry processing.

• Drive continuous improvement of network health through monitoring, data analysis, and field feedback — proactively identifying coverage gaps, latency issues, and interference patterns.

• Lead tower deployment strategy, including site selection, configuration, provisioning automation, and remote management, to enable zero-touch scalability.

• Help set the technical vision and direction for the network discipline alongside other technical leaders.

• Partner closely with firmware, backend, and product teams to ensure seamless end-to-end data flow from devices in the field through to the Halter platform.

• Contribute to cross-functional design discussions, making sure networking considerations — latency, range, throughput, redundancy — are well represented in product decisions.

• Own the rollout and support of networking tools and diagnostics that help teams debug communication issues and understand device behaviour across varied terrain and conditions.

• Mentor fellow engineers, sharing best practice in wireless networking, telemetry scaling, and high-availability systems.

• Implement and improve observability for network performance, using tooling and data pipelines that make system health visible and actionable.

• Help plan and prioritise work within the Network team, ensuring rapid value delivery and long-term reliability.

• Stay on top of evolving wireless networking, mesh architecture, spectrum management, and rural connectivity technologies, and bring new ideas back to the team.

• Participate in our 24/7 on-call rotation, helping ensure uptime across our deployed infrastructure and supporting incident resolution.

• Other tasks as needed, as part of a fast-paced, high-trust, mission-driven team scaling real-world systems.

What You'll Bring

• Deep experience designing and operating large-scale wireless networks, ideally including LPWAN/LoRa, cellular/3GPP, or similar low-power, long-range protocols.

• A track record of owning network architecture end-to-end — not just designing it, but keeping it healthy in production, at scale, over years.

• Comfort working across the full stack of a connectivity problem: RF and antenna behaviour, tower hardware, edge devices, and the cloud systems consuming the data.

• Experience with observability and monitoring for distributed or IoT systems — you know how to make network health visible before it becomes an incident.

• Have grown other engineers by working alongside them — sharing judgment and technique, not just reviewing their output.

• Stay calm under pressure, have a low ego, and can rally a team through tough or ambiguous problems.

• A first-principles approach: you reason from the ground up rather than defaulting to what's familiar, especially in a domain — rural, outdoor, variable-terrain wireless — where off-the-shelf answers rarely fit.

• Willingness to get out on farm. Understanding how the network actually behaves in the field is core to doing this job well.

Bonus Points

• Experience with mesh networking, spectrum management, or deploying infrastructure in remote or rural environments.

• Background in telemetry systems at IoT scale (thousands to millions of devices).

• Experience with provisioning automation and remote/zero-touch device management.

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!"

Halter is an accredited employer and can sponsor work visas and support relocation for the right candidate.