Senior Engineers - Product & Engineering

black.ai; Auckland; On-site; NZD 100,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Delicious snacks and drinks

Health insurance partnership

Annual personal growth budget of $1000

Unlimited paid annual leave

Job summary

black.ai is seeking a Senior Engineer in Auckland to design and deliver innovative engineering solutions. You will work closely with engineering, design, and product to tackle complex challenges in a dynamic environment committed to sustainability. Ideal candidates will have experience with significant system design and a passion for using AI tools. This role supports growth with a focus on mentorship and collaboration in a transformative atmosphere.

Qualifications

• Experience in designing and delivering complex systems in production.
• Ability to assess and improve customer experience beyond clean code.
• Experience mentoring engineers and supporting team collaboration.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and deliver features and systems end to end.
• Support and mentor other engineers through design conversations.
• Contribute to system reliability and performance.

Skills

Product engineering mindset

Complex system design

Experience with AWS

Mentorship capabilities

Use of AI tools

Education

Degree in software engineering or equivalent

Tools

Node.js

React

Kotlin

Go

Terraform

Job description

Location

Auckland

Employment Type

Full time

Location Type

On-site

Department

Engineering

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 standout Senior Engineers with a deep product instinct: people who care as much about the problem as the solution. You'll take on challenges that genuinely haven't been solved before. 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, lift the bar on how we build, 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

• Design, build, and deliver features and systems end to end, from the surfaces farmers touch to the services and infrastructure behind them.
• Make smart architectural calls, then back them up by writing the code.
• Work closely with engineering, design, and product to ship high-impact features quickly.
• Support and mentor other engineers through design conversations, code reviews, and generous context sharing.
• Contribute to the reliability and performance of our systems, 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 designed and delivered complex systems in production and have the experience (and scars) to show for it.
• 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 experience supporting and mentoring other engineers.
• 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 an 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 want many 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 every day 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!

If this opportunity sounds like you, please apply below by sending through your cover letter explaining why you’re excited about this role and working at Halter, along with your CV, and we’ll be in touch!

Please also feel free to check out the careers page for more information on working at Halter and don't forget to follow us on LinkedIn & Instagram.

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!"