Software Engineering Manager

Halter; Auckland; On-site; NZD 140,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Delicious snacks

Health insurance (Southern Cross)

6 months parental leave

4 weeks parental leave for secondary

Self-development budget $1000

Wellness leave

Unlimited annual leave

Employee stock ownership plan

Job summary

Halter is hiring a Software Engineering Manager to build and elevate their team, drive strong technical solutions, and own hard real-world problems. You’ll shape direction, collaborate with design and product, and stay hands-on while enabling growth and high performance in a paddock-ready platform.

You’ll mentor engineers, own team delivery, and guide architecture while ensuring quality and impact for farmers and ranchers.

Qualifications

• Led engineers directly with performance conversations, mentoring and hiring.
• Shaped technical direction and owned delivery for a team.
• Experience working with product and design to define requirements.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of frontend and backend engineers, guiding growth and feedback.
• Own technical direction and delivery, ensuring reliability and impact for farmers.
• Stay close to technical details across services and data, shaping system design.
• Back engineering-led initiatives and look for AI-enabled opportunities.
• Collaborate with product and design to clarify requirements and scope.
• Develop deep domain knowledge by getting out on farm and learning context.
• Contribute to Halter's engineering culture and practices.

Skills

Engineering leadership

People management

Technical strategy

Cross-functional collaboration

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 Role

We're looking for a Software Engineering Manager who builds and elevates their team, drives strong technical solutions, and goes deep on hard, real-world problems. This isn't a pure delivery or pure people role. You'll be in the work, shaping technical direction, collaborating closely with design and product, and helping your team do the best work of their careers. Don't worry, you'll also be hands-on.

You’ll need to hold the technical bar high while creating the space for others to grow. We're solving problems that haven't been solved before, and you'll be crucial to figuring them out. It's a role that demands absolute ownership, someone who can take a blurry problem, create clarity, and lead a team to nail it.

The kind of problems our teams solve

• 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. As an engineering manager at Halter, you're in the work, not above it: coaching engineers, shaping the technical bets, and writing code.

What You'll Do

• Lead a team of engineers - frontend and backend - supporting their growth, giving great feedback, and helping them focus on what matters.
• Own the technical direction and delivery of your team’s work - making sure it’s reliable, maintainable, and impactful. Help define the structure, shape, and scope of our work - and ensure it lands well with farmers and ranchers.
• Stay close to the technical details - across services, data, and system design - and bring a strong point of view.
• You’ll be backing engineering-led initiatives and getting ahead of scale.
• Work closely with product and design to shape what we build, not just how. You'll be in the room when requirements are fuzzy and you'll help make them clear.
• Back engineering-led initiatives and look for opportunities to use AI tools to accelerate development or unlock entirely new ways of working.
• Get out on farm. Deep domain knowledge matters and you'll be expected to develop it.
• Contribute to the broader engineering culture and practices that make Halter a great place to build.

You’ll be great if you

• Have led engineers directly - performance conversations, mentoring, hiring, the lot.
• Think like a product engineer. You care about what gets built and the impact it has on the person holding the phone in the paddock.
• Have a strong intuition for UX, performance, and product polish. You know what good feels like and you push for it.
• Know how to shape and structure work without being overly prescriptive, and balance speed with quality.
• Stay calm under pressure, have a low ego, and can rally a team through tough or complex work.
• You've worked in fast-moving startups, seen growth, and tackled ambiguous problem spaces.

Bonus points

for experience with hardware or real-world systems, mobile/React Native, and building experiences for demanding environments where the UX constraints are physical, not just digital.

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.

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!”