Software Engineering

halterhq.com; Auckland; On-site; NZD 90,000 - 130,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Snacks and drinks

Health insurance

Fully paid parental leave

Self-development budget

Wellness leave

Unlimited paid annual leave

Employee stock ownership plan

Job summary

Halter in Auckland, New Zealand is seeking Lead Engineers to tackle complex challenges and deliver robust solutions across software and AI systems. Ideal candidates will have experience shipping systems in production, a strong focus on the customer experience, and the ability to mentor others in a fast-paced, dynamic environment. Benefits include comprehensive parental leave, health insurance, and a self-development budget. Join an inclusive team and contribute to innovative solutions in agri-tech.

Qualifications

• Years of experience in shipping complex systems in production.
• Ability to stay calm under pressure and rally teams.
• Experience with cloud environments and modern frontend frameworks.
• Comfort with both relational and non-relational databases.

Responsibilities

• Take on complex problems and write the necessary code.
• Mentor engineers and support them through design conversations.
• Manage the reliability and performance of your domain.
• Engage with the farming environment to gain deep domain knowledge.

Skills

Complex systems experience

Calm under pressure

Customer experience focus

AI tools usage

Mentoring engineers

Adaptability

Cloud environments knowledge

UX intuition

Education

Degree in software engineering or equivalent

Tools

Node.js

Kotlin

Go

AWS

Terraform

Job description

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.

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.