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Halter is on a mission to unlock more productive and sustainable farming.
The Role
The Machine Learning Engineer will develop predictive models and systems for pasture management, requiring expertise in ML and agricultural knowledge.
Summary Generated by Built In
About the Role
Halter’s Pasture team is dedicated to helping farmers better manage their most valuable resource—pasture—for greater productivity, profit, and sustainability. To provide the highest quality insights to farmers, we’re building upon the bleeding edge of scientific advancements with unmatched access to rich, novel data to develop a cutting edge agricultural modelling system.
You’ll play a pivotal role on the machine learning team within Pasture, building advanced models of pasture growth and land properties that power intelligent, farmer-facing tools. Applications could range from remote sensing of pasture biomass, pasture quality estimation from photo and drone imagery, to grazing interval simulation for advanced recommendations.
You will be owning end to end development of machine learning pipelines, advanced contemporary modelling, to deployment and monitoring. You will work with great team-mates in engineering, product and design to achieve outsized results.
The impact of our work is profound, and we take that responsibility seriously. As a member of the Pasture team, you'll share our passion for technology and our commitment to optimizing the management of agricultural land.
You will be responsible for:
- 🌱Modeling, from biological processes to farm operations: You will drive development of predictive systems to solve real-world challenges faced by farmers.
- 📚Research, from technical to agriculture: you will be required to conduct extensive literature reviews, and stay ahead of the curve with respect to both machine-learning systems, and pasture science.
- 🛠️Model development: design, dataset construction, training and optimization: Rarely do we utilize a model off the shelf. You will own the architectural design, and all phases of model development.
- 👀Supporting your work in production: Halter engineers demonstrate a high level of ownership. We support what we build, and we learn from our systems behavior in the field.
- 🧠Proactive innovation: As a member of the data discipline it is expected that you will exercise a high degree of creativity to proactively deliver innovative ideas.
Who are we looking for?
- You are a high-output generalist: You will be required to work with autonomy across infrastructure, databases, simulation, and ML development. You will be restless with respect to advancing your own impact across the stack, leveraging AI companion tools and agents.
- You are a machine learning expert: You will be joining a highly capable team of technologists with deep experience in machine learning and complex systems. You will be required to provide extra strength in machine-learning theory, and its application to maximizing pasture efficiency.
- You have experience delivering highly complex predictive systems at the bleeding edge of research. Experience translating academic research into practical applications that add value to the world. You may be required to work on a range of problem-sets, from multi modal time-series modelling, to simulation systems.
- You are deeply curious and willing to become an expert in pasture-based farming.
- Our farmers expect us to know farming as well as they do, understand why they do what they do, and identify where they can do it better. Curiosity beyond technology and into the agricultural domain will be a strong motivation for you.
- You are a product-minded, strategic thinker: Halter is in the enviable position of possessing an immense depth of farm-data. You will be adept at mapping opportunities across our data-lake to systems that add positive value to farmers and ranchers.
- You embrace uncertainty and ambiguity. Uncertainty is intrinsic in the ambition of our team and company. We take big, calculated strides, and we embrace the challenge to do so.
- You are a highly effective collaborator and incredible teammate.
More concretely:
- You have a deep academic and/or professional background applying machine learning to solve real-world problems (e.g. a research oriented postgraduate degree in mathematics or computer science, with relevance to modelling with deep neural networks)
- Demonstrated experience designing, deploying, and monitoring machine learning systems to production
- Strong causal reasoning and an ability to design models that reflect real-world dynamics
- Strong data intuition and ability to work with noisy, high volume, high-dimensional datasets
- Fluency in Python and experience contributing to or working on complex, collaborative codebases
- Proficiency in contemporary AI companions and tooling for software and engineering productivity (e.g., Copilot, ChatGPT, Cursor)
- Excellent communication skills and a collaborative working style across disciplines
- Some experience in advanced ML architectures (Transformers or SSM), agent-based systems or recommendation systems is a plus, but not required.
Why our team loves working at Halter ❤️
- Dedicate yourself to solving real-world problems alongside an epic team in a culture designed around growth.
- A genuine and shared connection to our mission to make a difference in the world.
- The pride of joining an iconic New Zealand technology company. The excitement, risk, and reward of a high-growth technology scale-up on the global stage.
- Our ideas are truly valued, we are able to move fast, and our impact is real.
- State-of-the-art, dog-friendly office that’s been thoughtfully designed right in the heart of Auckland city. Did we mention dogs and cows?
- 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.
- We offer an inclusive and attractive remuneration package made up of salary, benefits and an employee stock ownership plan.
- Delicious snacks and drinks are available for your daily flow.
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.
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 Bessemer Venture Partners, DCVC, Blackbird, Promus Ventures, Rocket Lab’s Peter Beck and Icehouse ventures.
To find out more, visit our careers website, LinkedIn & Instagram.
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 for more information on working at Halter and don't forget to follow us on LinkedIn & Instagram.
Top Skills
Data Science
Deep Learning
Machine Learning
Python
What the Team is Saying
Nicola
North Island Business Development Manager
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The Company
What We Do
We bridge deep tech into farming. Halter enables farmers to remotely shift, virtually fence and proactively monitor their cows’ health and behaviour. Can you imagine watching 500 cows or cattle walk calmly towards the milking shed or their next break? No quad bikes, no dogs, no fences. Just a mob of cows walking at their own pace. People say it looks like magic. Our customers are revolutionising farming with Halter. It's changing lives and transforming an industry.
Why Work With Us
There's something special about being surrounded by spectacular people making real change in the world. At Halter, you'll do your best work, with the best people and have the biggest impact in a culture grounded in performance.
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Halter Offices
OnSite Workspace
Our field teams are often on the road however, we believe that in-person interaction is key to building a high-performing culture so there will be times when we would like our team to meet in person.
Typical time on-site:
None
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