Senior C++ Engineer, Animal Guidance (Embedded)

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 https://foundersfund.com, Bessemer Venture Partners https://www.bvp.com/, BOND, https://www.bondcap.com/ DCVC https://www.dcvc.com/, Blackbird https://www.blackbird.vc/, Promus Ventures https://www.promusventures.com/, Rocket Lab’s Peter Beck and Icehouse ventures https://www.icehouseventures.co.nz/?utm_term=icehouse%20ventures&utm_campaign=Brand+Keywords&utm_source=adwords&utm_medium=ppc&hsa_acc=4064636360&hsa_cam=16902737884&hsa_grp=134004309485&hsa_ad=592971340272&hsa_src=g&hsa_tgt=kwd-1082530126230&hsa_kw=icehouse%20ventures&hsa_mt=b&hsa_net=adwords&hsa_ver=3&gclid=Cj0KCQjw2v-gBhC1ARIsAOQdKY0J0DepRVFDmjQlAkJPbZuQnLSA5UVzUzOXYiPxkjX-SeVa513_BhkaAr-MEALw_wcB.

To find out more, visit our LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/company/halter-limited & Instagram https://www.instagram.com/lifeathalter/.

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 r