Principal Frontend Engineer

About the role Halter is a farmer's most used app – it lives in the dock on their phone, or on the desktop on their computer, and enables them to grow and harvest more grass through the use of virtual fencing, and to monitor and care for their animals through machine learning driven insights. On average a Halter farmer spends more than an hour a day across the Halter applications. It has replaced their physically demanding daily tasks with a user interface showing a birds eye view of their farm and the actions they can take. Now, instead of sitting behind the cows to bring them into the shed, a farmer schedules them to shift autonomously the night before, and meets them there; instead of setting up a physical fence to constrain area, farmers define it on the app, from anywhere, anytime. These applications are used to virtually fence and monitor over 300,000 cattle daily across New Zealand, Australia, and the United States. We’re in a phase of massive growth—up ~1500% over the past 3 years—and as we scale to more farms and countries, our product needs to scale too. This is where a principal frontend engineer is going to help; leading the charge across our platforms to ensure they stay performant, robust, and a joy to use. Expect to be hands-on, operating with a deep technical expertise across both a next.js web application, and a react native mobile application. You will be responsible for leading the frontend discipline, driving developer experience by ensuring consistency in patterns, practices, architecture, and componentry across teams, coordinating and levelling up engineers, and streamlining delivery – all helping our teams move fast without sacrificing quality.

What your day could look like

• Lead our web and mobile frontend platforms, ensuring the developer experience enables teams to move fast without sacrificing quality in code quality or user experience.
• Set frontend architectural standards and design patterns to ensure consistency, maintainability, and performance across our Next.js and React Native codebases.
• Lead technical planning and hands-on implementation of key platform initiatives to ensure our applications are up to date with modern standards.
• Collaborate closely with other team leads to prioritise cross-functional platform threads.
• Mentor engineers across the team, levelling up technical expertise and ensuring a strong frontend engineering culture.
• Review code, architecture, and delivery processes to reduce technical debt and increase engineering velocity without compromising quality.
• Advocate for the farmer’s experience, working with design and product to translate complex workflows into simple, elegant interfaces.
• Stay hands-on—writing code, experimenting with new technologies, and owning technical outcomes from prototype to production.
• Collaborate with senior leadership to align technical direction with Halter’s long-term product and platform vision.

Who we’re looking for

• Someone who is extremely motivated, wants their work to matter and is not afraid to push hard to help Halter achieve its mission
• You’ll love working as part of a high-performing team with high ownership and high accountability
• You prioritise understanding the complexity of the domain and have the ability to build deep empathy with our farmers
• Someone who is deeply experienced in frontend with a love for solving hard problems and the know-how to securely scale a system to millions of end users.
• Someone who is unphased by large codebases and even larger problem spaces
• You’ll thrive in ambiguity and don’t mind working with evolving requirements and perform at your best with high levels of ownership and accountability.
• A strong communicator that defaults to transparency and openness in decision-making while also being decisive to enable consistent momentum
• A team player that values collaboration, drives the team’s performance and excels in giving and receiving feedback
• Understands the importance of the Halter system as part of any farming business and holds the quality bar to 24/7 reliability and availability

Why our team loves working at Halter ❤️ We are New Zealand’s fastest growing company.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.

Originally posted on Himalayas

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