Site Reliability Engineer - Network Team

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, BOND, DCVC, Blackbird, Promus Ventures, Rocket Lab’s Peter Beck and Icehouse ventures.

To find out more, visit our LinkedIn & Instagram.

At Halter, we’re building more than software - we’re transforming the way the world farms. Our smart collars let farmers shift, monitor, and care for their cattle via deep integrations & insights. Behind it all is the Network Team, powering one of New Zealand’s largest private IoT networks with 400,000+ connected devices and counting.We’re looking for a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to help scale our systems to a million animals and beyond.
You’ll apply cloud-scale NRE practices to a wildly distributed, rural IoT network across multiple countries.Our vision is to become the OS for farming globally. This isn’t your average backend gig - this one moos 🐮. You’re not just writing code — you’re ensuring availability for hundreds of thousands of animals and farmers who rely on Halter every single day.

• 📈 Build & run observability for gateways, towers, and backend/edge services (metrics, logs, tracing, alerts; strong signal / low noise).

• 🤖 Automate ops: golden configs, zero-touch provisioning, safe canaries/rollbacks, scheduled maintenance, and self-healing where sensible.

• 🚨 Lead incidents end-to-end (runbooks, comms, mitigation, post-mortems) and drive fixes into code, configs, and process.

• 🚀 Harden deploys: progressive rollouts for firmware/agent/service changes across thousands of devices and multi-region backends.

• ⚙️ Performance tuning: reduce command/telemetry latency, smooth OTA pipelines, and de-risk noisy/unreliable links with back-pressure & retries.

• 🧭 Capacity & readiness: plan headroom for spikes and growth; chaos engineering for failover paths (cellular ↔ satellite, region failover).

• 📘 Own runbooks & SOPs that enable field teams and on-call to respond quickly and consistently.

• 🤝 Partner with Network/RF engineers on coverage/capacity changes, interference hunts, and carrier/satellite escalations.

• 🧭 Mentor teammates on SRE mindset, tools, and operational excellence.

• 🧰 SRE/large-scale ops experience (cloud + distributed systems).

• 💻 Strong automation & scripting (Python/Go/etc.) and IaC (Terraform/Ansible/etc.).

• 📡 Solid networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, routing, VPNs, firewalls) + RF awareness (LoRa/LTE/sat a plus).

• 🔭 Hands-on with observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, OpenTelemetry).

• 🧯 Proven incident management for high-availability systems.

• 🧩 Performance tuning for latency-sensitive, unreliable-link environments.

• 🐧 Comfortable in Linux across cloud and edge devices.

• 📊 Data-driven: able to turn noisy telemetry into decisions (SQL or Jupyter a plus).

• 🧠 Pragmatic problem-solver who balances reliability, speed, and cost.

• ➕ Bonus: IoT/off-grid/field deployments experience.

• 🏕️Network awareness (baseline, not deep-dive)

• 📡You don’t need to be a routing/RF guru — we have those.

• You should be comfortable with:🌐 Basic L3 troubleshooting: ping/traceroute, IP/subnetting, DNS/DHCP/NAT basics, reading simple routes.

• 📶 Reading link health: interpreting RSSI/SNR (LoRa) or RSRP/SINR (LTE) at a high level; spotting “link looks bad vs service is bad.”

• 🛰️ Backhaul pragmatics: understanding failover states (cellular ↔ satellite), cost/perf trade-offs, and safe config rollout patterns.

• 🗺️ Topology literacy: knowing what a gateway/tower/backhaul path looks like and where to put probes and alerts.

• 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.

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.

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.

• 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!"