Halter is a New Zealand startup that builds solar-powered smart collars for cattle enabling remote herding, virtual fencing and health monitoring.
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/. At Halter, data is the lifeblood of everything we build. Every second, collars stream behavioural, location, and health signals from cows in paddocks across the globe. Pair that with remote sensing, grazing data and pasture cover, and you have the foundation for helping farmers make smarter decisions every single day. But that's only one piece. Internally, we rely on production data from our manufacturing floor, field performance data from collars in the wild, and product analytics to shape how we build and scale. ABOUT THE ROLE We're looking for a Data Engineer with strong backend instincts to join our Data Engineering team to build the pipelines that make all of this work together. Day-to-day you'll partner closely with our machine learning, product, and platform teams to design systems that are reliable, observable, and ready for what's next. Whether it's optimising ingestion for billions of daily events, building robust transformation layers, connecting disparate data sources into a coherent whole, or ensuring data quality at scale you'll own problems end-to-end. If you want your work to have a tangible impact on how the world farms, this is the role for you. WHAT YOU’LL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR - Design, build, and maintain scalable data pipelines that move data reliably from source to insight. - Own data modelling decisions: clean schemas, sensible abstractions, and infrastructure that scales with the business. - Work closely with machine learning, product, and platform teams to ensure data is accessible, accurate, and ready when they need it. - Apply AI tools (like Claude Code or Cursor) to improve velocity while keeping pipelines easy to understand and evolve.Champion data quality by building validation, monitoring, and alerting so issues surface before they cause problems downstream. - Help define and evolve data practices and standards across the organisation, balancing pragmatic delivery with long-term maintainability. - Support and mentor other engineers through design conversations, code reviews, and generous context sharing. - Stay hands-on, helping shape not just the plumbing, but the data products that drive decisions.Contribute to the reliability and freshness of our data systems, especially when things get tricky at scale. - Help evolve our testing strategies, CI/CD workflows, and infrastructure patterns for data. WHO WE’RE LOOKING FOR - You have strong experience building and maintaining data pipelines for mission-critical systems, with a solid grasp of batch and streaming patterns.You have a confident understanding of data engineering best practices: modelling, transformation, orchestration, and quality assurance. - You're familiar with cloud infrastructure, ideally AWS. We use Athena, S3, Kinesis, SQS, and SNS, but experience with similar tools translates well. - You understand how to build systems that are observable, testable, and easy to debug - You're a product-minded engineer. You care about why we're building something, not just how. - You embrace ambiguity. At Halter, the problems worth solving rarely come with a clear spec. You're comfortable navigating uncertainty and making pragmatic calls. - You're deeply curious and motivated by impact. Bonus points if you're genuinely interested in agriculture, but what matters most is that you want your work to matter. - You're a highly effective collaborator. You lift the people around you through clear communication, generous knowledge sharing, and a low ego. - Importantly, we're looking for someone who is passionate about what they do and eager to learn. 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