Role overview

Halter is transforming livestock farming with a system combining hardware, software, and AI that enables farmers to manage grazing operations without traditional fencing, bikes, or dogs. As a Software Engineering Manager, you’ll lead a team of frontend and backend engineers while staying deeply involved in technical decisions and hands-on work, solving real-world problems that span sensor data processing, animal behavior modeling, mobile applications, and platform scalability.

Key responsibilities

Lead and develop a team of engineers, providing coaching, performance feedback, and support for their growth and career progression.
Own the technical direction and delivery of your team’s work, ensuring solutions are reliable, maintainable, and create meaningful impact for farmers and ranchers.
Stay close to technical details across services, data architecture, and system design, bringing a strong point of view to engineering decisions.
Collaborate with product and design to shape requirements and priorities, particularly when initial briefs are unclear or ambiguous.
Contribute hands-on technical work alongside your team, including code contributions and participation in engineering-led initiatives.
Explore opportunities to use AI tools to accelerate development or enable new ways of working within your team’s domain.
Develop deep domain knowledge by spending time on farm to understand how your team’s work translates to real user needs and constraints.

Requirements

Direct experience leading and managing software engineers, including hiring, performance conversations, and mentoring.
Strong product engineering mindset with genuine care about what gets built and its impact on end users.
Demonstrated ability to shape and structure work effectively without being overly prescriptive, balancing speed with quality.
Experience working in fast-moving startups, navigating growth, and solving ambiguous or novel problems.
Intuition for user experience, performance, and product polish, with an eye for recognizing and pushing for quality.
Ability to remain calm under pressure with low ego and capability to rally teams through complex work.
Experience with hardware systems, mobile or React Native development, or building for demanding physical environments is a bonus.

What makes this role worth considering

Halter operates in Auckland with an office-first culture designed to build strong relationships and high-performing teams through in-person collaboration. The role offers meaningful work on problems that genuinely haven’t been solved before, combining the technical depth of a complex system with direct visibility into real-world impact on working farms.