Senior Data Engineer

Job description

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 unlimited paid annual leave. - Importantly, we offer an inclusive and attractive remuneration package made up of salary, benefits and an employee stock ownership plan. OUR OFFICE FIRST APPROACH There’s a reason you visit your friends in person, live with your family and don’t do dinners over Zoom. Humans are wired for connection. We believe a world-class, in-person office culture is the best way for high-performing teams. Being office first is a core pillar of our culture. We believe in-person connections are key to driving your own growth, learning, impact, and building genuine long-lasting relationships. Strong relationships make it easier to disagree, give feedback, and do meaningful and aligned work. We don’t like having heaps of rules or policies, but this means having strong, trusted relationships is critical. We’re office first, not office only. This means working from the office everyday is our default setting, but we flex when we need to. We have a high-trust culture, so everyone is trusted to do what’s best for Halter. Our office vibe is something special, it’s hard to describe until you’re here, but people at Halter who have come from fully remote or hybrid companies say they could never go back - the high energy and spectacular people they are now surrounded by everyday makes work so enjoyable. Your growth, your learning and your impact is truly unlimited here, and a big part of that comes from being together solving problems, innovating, building context, and constantly learning from each other. 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 https://www.halterhq.com/careers for more information on working at Halter and don't forget to follow us on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/halter-limited & Instagram https://www.instagram.com/lifeathalter/. 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!"