Site Reliability Engineer - Network Team
Auckland
Engineering & Data – Software Engineering /
Full-time /
On-site
About the role
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 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 uptime for hundreds of thousands of animals and farmers who rely on Halter every single day.
What you'll do
- 📈 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; game-days/chaos 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.
- 👀 Champion observability: better logs, metrics, tracing, and signal-to-noise alerting.
- 🧭 Mentor teammates on NRE mindset, tools, and operational excellence.
Who we're looking for:
- 🧰 SRE/NRE/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 notebooks 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.
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.
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.
Why our team loves working at Halter
At Halter, we’re committed to creating an environment where people thrive. We offer unlimited paid annual leave, as well as additional wellness days. Each year, every team member receives a $1,000 self-development budget to invest in whatever fuels their personal growth.
We offer six months of fully paid leave for primary caregivers and four weeks of fully paid leave for secondary caregivers, along with a range of additional family-friendly benefits. To support your wellbeing, we offer subsidised health insurance through Southern Cross.
And finally, everyone at Halter is an owner. Every employee is part of our stock ownership plan; when we succeed, you share in that success.
Our office-first approach
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.
We’re office first, not office only. This means that working from the office every day is our default setting, but we flex when needed. Your growth, learning, and impact are truly unlimited here, and a big part of that comes from being together, solving problems, innovating, building context, and constantly learning from each other.
We have a state-of-the-art, dog-friendly office in the heart of Auckland City and a test farm in Morrinsville. Delicious snacks and drinks are readily available.
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 and revolutionizing grazing with Halter. People join Halter to do meaningful work. Our team out-think, out-work and out-care. We’re committed to delivering real change in the world. 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.
Join our team
If this opportunity sounds like you, please apply below by sending your cover letter explaining why you’re excited about this role and working at Halter, along with your CV.
If you think you have what it takes but don’t necessarily meet every requirement on this job description, please still get in touch. We’d love to chat to see if you’ll be an epic fit!
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.
