Lead Software Engineers

Halter; Auckland; On-site; NZD 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health insurance

Self-development budget

Wellness leave

Unlimited annual leave

Employee stock ownership plan

Job summary

Halter is seeking Lead Engineers to tackle the hardest problems in a hardware-software-AI system that runs on real farms. You will lead architectural decisions, ship robust solutions, and mentor peers to raise the whole team's capabilities.

We value deep ownership, strong engineering craft, and the ability to work across frontend, backend, full stack, and platform areas. Expect collaboration with teams solving real-world agricultural challenges, using AWS and Terraform at scale.

Qualifications

• Experience shipping complex systems in production.
• Calm under pressure with ability to lead through tough problems.
• Familiarity with cloud environments, preferably AWS.

Responsibilities

• Take on the hardest problems and ship the work that proves them out.
• Make architectural calls and implement them with code.
• Set the standard for thoughtful engineering: clean, observable, evolvable code and systems.
• Mentor other engineers through design discussions and code reviews.
• Evolve testing strategies, CI/CD workflows, and infrastructure patterns.
• Own reliability and performance of your domain with end-to-end ownership.

Skills

Shipping complex systems

Cloud experience (AWS)

Education

Software engineering degree (or equivalent)

Tools

AWS

Job description

Jora New Zealand will close on 9th September 2026. Thank you for being with us, we are cheering you on as you continue your career journey.

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.
• Every team here ships software that has to work in a paddock, not just a browser tab.

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 REST APIs, distributed systems, and event-driven services. Comfort with both relational and non-relational databases. Node.js, Kotlin, Go, or systems that integrate with hardware/IoT a bonus.

Full stack: all of the above, end to end, across web, mobile, and the services that power them.

Platform: you love building tooling that makes the whole company move faster, including the AI tooling that's reshaping how engineers work. Strong AWS and Terraform at scale, with experience across CI/CD, observability, and on-call tooling.

Our Benefits

• Delicious snacks and drinks are available for your daily flow.
• 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.
• Importantly, we offer an inclusive and attractive remuneration package made up of salary, benefits and an employee stock ownership plan.

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.

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!