Lead Network Engineer - Wireless networks

About the company

Halter is a New Zealand startup that builds solar-powered smart collars for cattle enabling remote herding, virtual fencing and health monitoring.

About this role

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 https://foundersfund.com, Bessemer Venture Partners https://www.bvp.com/, BOND, https://www.bondcap.com/ DCVC https://www.dcvc.com/, Blackbird https://www.blackbird.vc/, Promus Ventures https://www.promusventures.com/, Rocket Lab’s Peter Beck and Icehouse ventures https://www.icehouseventures.co.nz/?utm_term=icehouse%20ventures&utm_campaign=Brand+Keywords&utm_source=adwords&utm_medium=ppc&hsa_acc=4064636360&hsa_cam=16902737884&hsa_grp=134004309485&hsa_ad=592971340272&hsa_src=g&hsa_tgt=kwd-1082530126230&hsa_kw=icehouse%20ventures&hsa_mt=b&hsa_net=adwords&hsa_ver=3&gclid=Cj0KCQjw2v-gBhC1ARIsAOQdKY0J0DepRVFDmjQlAkJPbZuQnLSA5UVzUzOXYiPxkjX-SeVa513_BhkaAr-MEALw_wcB. To find out more, visit our LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/halter-limited & Instagram https://www.instagram.com/lifeathalter/. ABOUT THE TEAM The Network team owns the wireless backbone that connects every collar to the Halter platform, moving half-a-billion messages between the backend and collars per day! That touches LoRa-based communication protocols, cellular backhaul, the tower network itself, and the edge-to-cloud pipeline that turns radio traffic into real-time telemetry farmers and ranchers can trust. As Halter scales across new farms, regions, and terrain, this network has to scale with it — reliably, because cows don’t take days off. ABOUT THE ROLE We're looking for a Senior Network Engineer to take ownership of the performance, reliability, and scalability of Halter's collar and tower network. You'll operate at the intersection of wireless communication protocols, tower infrastructure, and real-time data flow — diagnosing issues from the field, designing the architecture that prevents them, and setting the technical direction for how the network evolves as Halter grows. This is a senior, hands-on technical role. You'll be the person other engineers come to with the gnarliest wireless and infrastructure problems, and you'll be expected to make the calls that matter when it counts. WHAT YOU'LL DO - Work across technical and commercial teams to understand on-farm connectivity challenges and translate them into actionable requirements that improve the performance and reliability of Halter's IoT network. - Take ownership of the operation and optimisation of Halter's collar and tower network, ensuring robust performance, scalability, and minimal downtime. - Design and evolve the network architecture, with a focus on wireless communication protocols (e.g. LoRa), tower infrastructure, edge-to-cloud data flow, and real-time telemetry processing. - Drive continuous improvement of network health through monitoring, data analysis, and field feedback — proactively identifying coverage gaps, latency issues, and interference patterns. - Lead tower deployment strategy, including site selection, configuration, provisioning automation, and remote management, to enable zero-touch scalability. - Help set the technical vision and direction for the network discipline alongside other technical leaders. - Partner closely with firmware, backend, and product teams to ensure seamless end-to-end data flow from devices in the field through to the Halter platform. - Contribute to cross-functional design discussions, making sure networking considerations — latency, range, throughput, redundancy — are well represented in product decisions. - Own the rollout and support of networking tools and diagnostics that help teams debug communication issues and understand device behaviour across varied terrain and conditions. - Mentor fellow engineers, sharing best practice in wireless networking, telemetry scaling, and high-availability systems. - Implement and improve observability for network performance, using tooling and data pipelines that make system health visible and actionable. - Help plan and prioritise work within the Network team, ensuring rapid value delivery and long-term reliability. - Stay on top of evolving wireless networking, mesh architecture, spectrum management, and rural connectivity technologies, and bring new ideas back to the team. - Participate in our 24/7 on-call rotation, helping ensure uptime across our deployed infrastructure and supporting incident resolution. - Other tasks as needed, as part of a fast-paced, high-trust, mission-driven team scaling real-world systems. WHAT YOU'LL BRING - Deep experience designing and operating large-scale wireless networks, ideally including LPWAN/LoRa, cellular/3GPP, or similar low-power, long-range protocols. - A track record of owning network architecture end-to-end — not just designing it, but keeping it healthy in production, at scale, over years. - Comfort working across the full stack of a connectivity problem: RF and antenna behaviour, tower hardware, edge devices, and the cloud systems consuming the data. - Experience with observability and monitoring for distributed or IoT systems — you know how to make network health visible before it becomes an incident. - Have grown other engineers b