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/. ABOUT THE ROLE We're looking for a Firmware Test Engineer to join our Device Platform team and help us prove, rigorously and repeatably, at fleet scale, that our collar firmware does exactly what it's supposed to. This isn't a role tacked onto the end of development. You'll be embedded with the firmware and hardware engineers building the collar, catching problems on the bench before they ever reach a paddock, and building the automation that means we don't have to find the same bug twice. Our team out-thinks, out-works and out-cares. We're committed to delivering real change in the world. This isn't easy, and honestly, we love that it's hard. 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 BE DOING - Get hands-on with real collar hardware (GPS, LoRa mesh, cellular, BLE, sensors) and build the test rigs and automation that put it through its paces. - Design and own test strategies for our collar firmware, from low-level FreeRTOS behaviour up through to the data it produces in the cloud. - Build automated regression and hardware-in-the-loop test frameworks (Python) and wire them into our CI/CD pipeline, so every firmware release gets solid, consistent coverage before it goes anywhere near an animal. - Chase problems all the way down: from a weird signal on a collar, through the LoRa/cellular uplink, through protobuf-encoded payloads, into Athena and Elasticsearch. You'll need to be comfortable following the trail wherever it leads. - Dig into field and fleet data (Grafana, Athena, Elasticsearch) to spot regressions and reliability issues that only show up once you're running thousands of collars in the real world, not just on the bench. - Work directly with firmware engineers to turn "this seems flaky" into a clear, reproducible defect with a root cause. - Help us mature our testing culture as a growing team: better test plans, better regression coverage, better release confidence. WHAT YOU'LL BRING - Experience testing embedded firmware or software for a real, physical product. Bonus points if it had to survive somewhere hostile. - Strong automation chops in Python, and you've built or maintained a test framework from the ground up before, not just used one. - You're just as comfortable with a debugger and a bench setup as you are writing test code. UART, SPI, I2C, JTAG don't scare you. - You've got CI/CD pipelines wired into your workflow already. - You're a sharp troubleshooter. You form hypotheses, test them, and know when to loop in the engineer who wrote the code. - You work well in a fast-moving Agile team and don't wait to be told what to test next. BONUS POINTS FOR - Experience with LoRa/LoRaWAN, BLE, or cellular IoT (LTE-M/NB-IoT). - Protobuf or similar binary serialisation, especially around schema compatibility. - AWS experience (Athena, Elasticsearch, Lambda, EventBridge, Grafana). - FreeRTOS or other RTOS environments. - Genuine curiosity about farming, animal welfare, or hardware that has to work outdoors, unattended, on a live animal. We can teach the domain, but the curiosity has to be there already. 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