Lead C++ Engineer - Embedded Animal Guidance

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

To find out more, visit our LinkedIn & Instagram.

What you'll be doing

Own the guidance firmware, the virtual fencing logic on our collars that decides when and how to guide each animal. Your code and decisions will be responsible for millions of cattle, on thousands of farms, on several continents, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. That covers everything from initial design through implementation and testing to mass deployment and ongoing production support across a large, live fleet.

Design guidance algorithms, state machines and the geometry behind virtual fences and paths, always putting every animal's wellbeing first. Design the protocols that get guidance data onto the collar and animal data back off it over a low-bandwidth radio link.

You'll build it all in modern C++ (C++23) on FreeRTOS, with real constraints around power, memory and reliability.

Debug hard, intermittent, field-only problems using logs, telemetry and a genuine understanding of the system and animals, not just guesswork.

Work closely with firmware, backend and frontend engineers, designers and animal experts, and spend time observing the animals themselves, so the whole guidance system, not just your code, actually holds up.

Contribute to the quality and reliability of the guidance system as a whole: better patterns, better tooling, better ways of catching problems before they reach a paddock.

Support and mentor other engineers through design conversations, code reviews and generous context sharing.

What you'll bring

You don't need a firmware-only background. Game and game engine developers work on many of the same challenges we do: steering agents through a world, collision with irregular shapes, state machines that must never get stuck, and squeezing everything into a fixed frame budget. If that's you, we'd love to hear from you.

Solid experience shipping software for resource-constrained systems, such as embedded devices, consoles or real-time engines, and the scars to show for it.

• Strong C++ fundamentals and software design patterns.

• Comfort with tight constraints: concurrency, limited memory and stack, and real-time behaviour."

• Good judgement under uncertainty: inaccurate sensor data, unexpected animal behaviour and unclear requirements.

• You enjoy reasoning about geometry, probability and timing, like working out the best path to guide a cow, or how sure we are of where an animal is.

• A strong sense of ownership. You want to understand why something works, not just that it works, and you follow problems all the way to root cause.

• Give and receive feedback well, as a strong team player.

Bonus points for

• Experience with state machines or pathfinding.

• Experience with real-time operating system internals (FreeRTOS or similar), interrupts and reasoning about scheduling, priorities and timing guarantees.

• Experience with safety-critical systems, or with unreliable, low-bandwidth communication links.

• Experience working with animals, or genuine curiosity about farming, animal welfare, or hardware that has to survive outdoors, unattended, on a live animal. We can teach the domain, but the curiosity has to be there already.

Our Benefits

• Importantly, we offer an inclusive and attractive remuneration package made up of salary, benefits and an employee stock ownership plan.

• Healthy body, healthy mind. We’re partnered with Southern Cross Health Insurance to support your well-being.

• Our personal growth is important. Halter offers an annual $1000 self-development budget to be used for anything that fuels personal growth.

• 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 time to recharge is valued, we’re offered wellness leave and unlimited paid annual leave.

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 every day 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 every day makes work so enjoyable. Your growth, your learning and your 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.

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:

• 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 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!"