Software Engineer, Peoeple Ecosystem

Halter; Auckland; On-site; NZD 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Job summary

Halter is seeking a software engineer to join our People Ecosystems team in building a unified HR data platform. You will shape the end-to-end lifecycle of features from frontend to backend, crafting reliable APIs and data pipelines that power hiring, HR, payroll and performance analytics.

You'll collaborate closely with product managers and other engineers, with a focus on scalable, observable, and maintainable systems that support Halter's rapid growth and mission.

Qualifications

• For candidates with around 4 to 5 years of software engineering experience.
• Strong full-stack skills, with TypeScript/React on the frontend and Python/Node on the backend.
• Experience designing production-grade APIs and data pipelines.
• Experience maintaining CI/CD pipelines and conducting code reviews.
• Ability to collaborate across product, design and engineering teams.

Responsibilities

• Build and ship full-stack features for Halter's Talent and People ecosystem.
• Design and implement APIs, services and data structures to connect HR data.
• Develop intuitive front ends and reliable backend systems.
• Take features from scoping through deployment and iteration.
• Maintain solid engineering foundations with CI/CD, testing and observability.

Skills

Full-stack engineering

TypeScript/React

Python/Node

APIs & data pipelines

CI/CD pipelines

Code reviews

Observability & performance

Cross-team collaboration

Tools

Git

CI/CD tooling

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.

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.

Background

Almost no company builds its own people and performance products. Halter does, and we're hiring our first software engineer to bring these ambitions to life.

Most companies run hiring, performance and people data on a stack of vendor tools, and accept whatever ships. The result is products that feel out of step with the culture and what the company cares about, and a place that feels less human and less unique the bigger it gets. We think that's backwards.

You'll build people and performance products that put our people and culture at the centre. This role underpins our ability to scale two things we care about a lot: our people, and how well we perform together.

Why now

We've grown quickly and we're on track to double again, soon. We're laying new foundations for our people systems right now, so you won't be inheriting someone else's mess. You'll be shaping what Halter's people stack looks like from the ground up, and we think that's pretty exciting.

And we're not stopping at Halter. We want to change how people products get built, inside our four walls and well beyond them.

A People team that's backed

Halter puts serious investment into its People team. Not a couple of HR tools and a spreadsheet, but a dedicated team building product, data and engineering for the people who work here. That almost never happens.

We do it because our culture is one of our biggest advantages, and culture is the first thing to crack when a company scales fast. The clarity, the pace, the high standards, the sense that someone actually cares how your career is going and sees you as an individual. Keeping all of that at 1,000 people (and well beyond) doesn't happen by accident. It gets built with intention.

That's your job. The things you ship will shape what it feels like to work at Halter for everyone who joins after you. Not many engineers get to say their product is the culture.

What You Might Build We\'re not going to hand you a backlog (but we\'ll absolutely build it with you). To give you a feel:

• Think a tool that turns performance calibration from a week of spreadsheets into something leaders run themselves.
• Think knowing which hiring channels produce the people who go on to do their best work, not just the most applications.
• Think a new starter's first 90 days that runs on rails, with the right nudges landing at the right moment.
• Think a single, trusted view of every person's journey, from first application to promotion, that leaders actually open.
• Or think of something we haven't. Bring it.
  

What You'll Be Doing

• Build and ship full-stack products across Talent and People, from React front ends to Python services and data pipelines
• Design and build the backend services, APIs and data structures that connect hiring, HR, payroll and performance data into one trusted view
• Build clean, intuitive front ends that leaders, managers and our People team actually want to open
• Take the features you build from start to finish: scoping, architecting, building, testing, deploying and iterating
• Look after the engineering foundations, like repos, pull requests, code reviews and CI/CD pipelines, so what you ship stays reliable and easy to change
• Use AI as a tool in your toolkit, building it into well-designed systems where it creates real leverage, not novelty
• Treat people data as the most sensitive data in the company, with access, retention and audit designed in from the start
• Help our product managers for Talent and People become more technical, just by working with you

About The Role
You'll be the first software engineer in People Ecosystems, the team building the product, data and analytics layer underneath People and Performance at Halter. Our people data lake went live earlier this year, and there's a long list of things that should be beautiful product rather than process.

You'll get the intent and the constraints, and real freedom on how. We'll collaborate on what matters and why, you'll build, and we'll shape it together as it comes to life.

You won't be on an island. You'll report to our Manager, People Ecosystems, who owns the roadmap and will coach you directly, and you'll tap into Halter's engineering and product teams for code review, architecture and learning.

Day to day, you'll work side by side with our product managers for Talent and People. You'll work across both, so you'll get to see (and shape) the whole employee lifecycle.

What We're Looking For

We're after someone with around 4 to 5 years' experience, real craft, and plenty of room left to grow.

Technically

• Strong full-stack engineering skills, ideally TypeScript and/or React on the front end and Python and/or Node on the back end
• Solid experience designing and building production-grade APIs, services, data structures and data pipelines
• Hands-on with the engineering foundations: managing repos and pull requests, reviewing code, and building and maintaining CI/CD pipelines
• You build for the long run: maintainable code, with reliability, observability and performance in mind from day one
• Comfortable working across the stack. You're not precious about where a problem lives, you just want to solve it well
• You care whether what you build gets used. A feature nobody adopts isn't a win

As a person

• Self-aware. You know what you're great at and where you're still growing, and you say both out loud
• Empathetic. You'll be building with data about people’s experience and performance. You feel the weight and sensitivity of that, and it shows in how you build
• Coachable. You take direction well and you don't need to have had the idea to be all in on it. You also read between the lines, because not everything in this space can be written down
• A good teacher. You explain things in a way that leaves people feeling more capable, not less
• A simplifier. You love taking something complex and making it simple enough that everyone can understand it and have a say
• Collaborative. You enjoy working tightly with non-technical teams and bringing people along with you

Bonus points if you have

• Experience building with AI, like vector databases, embeddings or retrieval systems
• Exposure to workflow tools like n8n, Temporal or Airflow
• Experience with data engineering, ETL pipelines or event-driven architecture
• Built with HR, recruiting or payroll systems and their APIs
• A love for fast-paced, ambiguous environments. You actually enjoy the uncertainty

Sky's the limit
Sky's the limit