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Halter is a venture-backed agtech company transforming livestock grazing through IoT collar technology and AI. The company has raised from top-tier investors including Founders Fund, Bessemer Venture Partners, and DCVC, and is headquartered in Auckland, New Zealand.
You'll join the Device Platform team as a Senior Firmware Test Engineer, responsible for rigorous testing and validation of collar firmware at fleet scale. This is not a post-development QA role—you'll be embedded with firmware and hardware engineers from the start, catching issues on the bench before they reach farms, and building automation to prevent recurring bugs.
Key responsibilities include:
- Design and own comprehensive test strategies for collar firmware, from low-level FreeRTOS behavior through cloud data pipelines
- Build and maintain automated regression and hardware-in-the-loop test frameworks in Python, integrated into CI/CD
- Get hands-on with real collar hardware (GPS, LoRa mesh, cellular, BLE, sensors) and develop test rigs
- Troubleshoot end-to-end: from collar signals through LoRa/cellular uplinks, protobuf payloads, into Athena and Elasticsearch
- Analyze field and fleet data using Grafana, Athena, and Elasticsearch to identify regressions visible only at scale
- Collaborate directly with firmware engineers to reproduce and root-cause issues
- Help mature testing culture and release confidence as the team grows
You bring strong embedded firmware testing experience from real, physical products (bonus if they operated in harsh environments). You're proficient in Python and have built test frameworks from scratch. You're equally comfortable with debuggers and bench setups as with test code—UART, SPI, I2C, JTAG are familiar. You have CI/CD pipeline experience, sharp troubleshooting skills, and thrive in fast-moving Agile teams.
Bonus experience: LoRa/LoRaWAN, BLE, cellular IoT (LTE-M/NB-IoT), Protobuf, AWS (Athena, Elasticsearch, Lambda, EventBridge, Grafana), FreeRTOS, or genuine curiosity about farming and animal welfare.
