Lead Cyber Security Engineer
Halter
Date: 23 hours ago
City: Auckland, Auckland
Contract type: Full time
About The Role
Halter enables farmers to grow and graze more grass through the use of virtual fencing. Every farm is deployed with communication infrastructure and a collar for each animal, which is then paired with a mobile and web application. The result is tens of hours of labour saving per week, improved animal welfare, and increased productivity and sustainability of the land.
To ensure we can keep the system airtight and continue to deliver on this mission we are looking to bring on our first cyber security engineer.
With Halter's system now serving hundreds of thousands of devices in the field, and spanning over 30 engineers across five teams, we need to make sure we have the right ways of working in place to deliver a reliable and secure product as we expand globally.
As the first in this role you have the opportunity to define how we think about cyber security here at Halter. You will have ownership over everything from security practices, to education of the team, to threat detection, compliance, third-party assessment, penetration testing, and everything in between.
In this role you will be hands-on, operating with deep technical expertise, a high level of agency, as well as strong communication skills. You will work across the entire technical stack, from the mobile code, to our backend systems, all the way to the firmware running on the collar. You can expect a high level of collaboration working as part of our ‘context over control’ culture to introduce best practices that mature our security posture while ensuring we maintain the speed of delivery we value as a company.
As part of this you will work primarily in the AWS ecosystem across a mix of managed and self managed services. You will work alongside a small but deeply experienced platform engineering team, all with a strong mindset of IaC, a love for autonomy, and a passion for their craft.
What Your Day Could Look Like
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.
Halter enables farmers to grow and graze more grass through the use of virtual fencing. Every farm is deployed with communication infrastructure and a collar for each animal, which is then paired with a mobile and web application. The result is tens of hours of labour saving per week, improved animal welfare, and increased productivity and sustainability of the land.
To ensure we can keep the system airtight and continue to deliver on this mission we are looking to bring on our first cyber security engineer.
With Halter's system now serving hundreds of thousands of devices in the field, and spanning over 30 engineers across five teams, we need to make sure we have the right ways of working in place to deliver a reliable and secure product as we expand globally.
As the first in this role you have the opportunity to define how we think about cyber security here at Halter. You will have ownership over everything from security practices, to education of the team, to threat detection, compliance, third-party assessment, penetration testing, and everything in between.
In this role you will be hands-on, operating with deep technical expertise, a high level of agency, as well as strong communication skills. You will work across the entire technical stack, from the mobile code, to our backend systems, all the way to the firmware running on the collar. You can expect a high level of collaboration working as part of our ‘context over control’ culture to introduce best practices that mature our security posture while ensuring we maintain the speed of delivery we value as a company.
As part of this you will work primarily in the AWS ecosystem across a mix of managed and self managed services. You will work alongside a small but deeply experienced platform engineering team, all with a strong mindset of IaC, a love for autonomy, and a passion for their craft.
What Your Day Could Look Like
- Help define and evolve security practices and standards across the organization, balancing pragmatic risk reduction with the need for developer velocity and operational effectiveness
- Write and maintain high-quality code and tooling to resolve known security issues and address vulnerabilities across our full engineering stack, from infrastructure to application layers
- Provide mentorship, guidance, and technical leadership to engineers across the business, ensuring security knowledge and best practices are understood, adopted, and embedded into team workflows
- Work closely with domain-specific engineering teams to dive deep into complex security challenges, leading investigations and developing robust solutions that scale
- Identify, fix, and prevent vulnerabilities across the platform through proactive design reviews, secure coding practices, regular testing, and architecture improvements
- Drive security incident response readiness, participating in detection, analysis, and resolution of security incidents while embedding learnings into future prevention strategies
- Maintain consistent communication and collaboration with third-party partners and vendors to ensure we are effectively leveraging external expertise, audits, and tools to meet our security goals
- Contribute to security education and awareness initiatives, helping foster a strong culture of security across all parts of the organization
- Participate in a 24/7 on-call rotation, providing expert security support during incidents and working to continuously improve our operational response capabilities
- 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 cyber security 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
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.
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