Senior Software Engineer - Platform
Halter · Auckland, New Zealand · 1mo ago
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
Halter is one system: hardware, software, and AI, running live on real farms. Our platform is what turns that ambitious engineering into farmer and rancher impact. Every collar on every cow, every grazing break a farmer sets, and every alert a vet acts on depends on infrastructure that's reliable, secure, and easy for our engineers to build on. As Halter grows globally and our systems handle billions of daily events from the paddock, the platform underneath needs to scale with us - without slowing anyone down.
We're looking for a Senior Engineer to join our Platform team and help build, run, and evolve the systems that everything else at Halter sits on. You'll bring deep technical expertise to a small team, play a meaningful role in shaping how a fast-growing engineering organisation thinks about cloud infrastructure, developer experience, security, and AI-assisted engineering, and have the autonomy to own significant pieces of the work end-to-end.
Day-to-day you'll work closely with engineering teams across the business - backend, ML, and data - to make sure the platform accelerates their velocity rather than gating it. Whether it's evolving our internal AI tooling into something the whole org relies on, building golden paths that make the right thing the easy thing, hardening our cloud security posture, or keeping our collar-to-cloud pipeline rock-solid as we scale, you'll own problems end-to-end. If you want your work to multiply the impact of every other engineer at Halter, this is the role.
What you'll do
Help shape how Halter leverages AI tooling to accelerate development. We've already invested in internal AI infrastructure that engineers rely on day-to-day, and you'll help it grow from an engineering-team tool into something the whole org leans on - contributing to the adoption patterns, the guardrail to the force-multiplier use cases.
Build out the tooling, guardrails, and golden paths that make it easy for other engineers to ship safely and quickly. The right paved roads multiply every engineer's impact, and you'll shape where ours go next.
Contribute to the technical direction for our cloud infrastructure as Halter scales globally, helping make the architecture decisions that balance velocity, cost, reliability, and operational simplicity.
Bake security into the platform through guardrails and sensible defaults across IAM, network policy, secrets management, and supply chain, so the secure path is also the easy path for every team.
Keep our core compute and orchestration layer reliable at the scale farmers and ranchers depend on, day in and day out.
Drive observability and incident tooling forward, treating on-call as a signal rather than a cost. Engineers should be able to detect, diagnose, and resolve issues before they reach farmers and ranchers.
Automate infrastructure management through Infrastructure-as-Code, CI/CD pipelines, and internal tooling that reduces operational load over time.
Contribute to cross-functional architecture discussions and help evolve platform practices and standards, balancing pragmatic delivery with long-term maintainability.
Mentor and grow other engineers through design conversations, code reviews, and generous context sharing.
Be part of an on-call rotation, working with a highly skilled team to resolve incidents and put preventative measures in place.
You'll be great if you:
Have deep experience building and operating AWS at scale, with strong fluency in container orchestration, cloud networking, and Infrastructure-as-Code. Terraform at scale is a big plus.
Have shipped meaningful platform or infrastructure work in a production environment, ideally in a high-growth setting.
Understand what good developer experience looks like, and have built golden paths, paved roads, or internal platforms that engineers reach for instead of rolling their own.
Treat security as a first-class part of platform engineering, not an afterthought, and have hands-on experience hardening cloud environments.
Are excited about how AI tooling can change the way engineering teams work, and have a point of view on where it adds leverage versus where it adds risk. Bonus if you've built an AI agent or AI-assisted tooling in production - we have internal AI infrastructure of our own, and we'll want your take on where it goes next.
Understand how to build systems that are observable, testable, and easy to debug at scale.
Are a strong communicator who collaborates well across teams, raising the bar on practices through clear writing, thoughtful design conversations, and code review.
Stay calm under pressure, have a low ego, and lift the people around you through clear communication and generous knowledge sharing.
Embrace ambiguity. The biggest platform problems rarely come with a clear spec, and you're comfortable navigating uncertainty and making pragmatic calls.
Have backend product development experience (a plus) - it helps you understand how engineers build products and what they need from the platform underneath them.
A degree in software engineering (or equivalent) is nice to have, but not essential.
Why our team loves working at Halter ❤️
We are New Zealand's fastest growing company.
Dedicate yourself to solving real-world problems alongside an epic team in a culture designed around growth.
A genuine and shared connection to our mission to make a difference in the world.
The pride of joining an iconic New Zealand technology company. The excitement, risk, and reward of a high-growth technology scale-up on the global stage.
Our ideas are truly valued, we are able to move fast, and our impact is real.
State-of-the-art, dog-friendly office that's been thoughtfully designed right in the heart of Auckland city. Did we mention dogs and cows?
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.
We offer an inclusive and attractive remuneration package made up of salary, benefits and an employee stock ownership plan.
Delicious snacks and drinks are available for your daily flow.
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!"