We get the privilege of creating a product that has real-world implications where our work can be seen, heard, and touched. With the opportunity to meet with our farmers we regularly go out on farm to physically see how our work positively impacts both cows and farmers. It’s rare to find a piece of technology where users are in an app for about 3 to 4 hours a day and save about 30 to 40 hours a week. We are the most used app on a farmer’s phone and mission critical to a farmers operational success.

Domains: The team sits across three domains - two software domains: Product and Tech, and the Firmware domain. The product takes care of our customer-facing experience, whilst Tech creates the magic behind the scenes including virtual fencing, guidance, behaviour, and pasture machine learning models. Firmware is the glue between our teams ensuring our collars can communicate to our backend, our systems are highly available, and our hardware is state of the art.

Software: We’re a team that challenges ourselves to do the best work of our career. We collectively work on deep technical problems that stretch even our most experienced engineers with daily problem-solving in machine learning models, IoT, physical to digital world design, complex algorithms, database design, and system integrations. With Halter taking in over 9000 data points per minute per collar, and with hundreds of thousands of collars in the field, we need to ensure we are engineering our systems in a way that allows farmers to leverage what is now the largest dairy cow behaviour dataset in the world at scale.

Firmware: The firmware team thrives in a fast-paced, ever-changing environment, specialising in the development of the "brains" of the collar. Between monitoring the health status and heat patterns of cows, to enabling their efficient movement across the farm, and reliable holding of cows in user defined areas, there's no shortage of challenges on a daily basis. Our collars leverage a sophisticated LoRa network for communication, communicate collar-to-collar through a mesh network, and communicate over WiFi to stay up to date with our backend systems providing a near real time communication loop with every collar. Internally we foster an inclusive and enjoyable work environment, where hard work is met with camaraderie. Our diverse skill set is distributed across the Animal team, focused on refining the ‘cowgorithm’ that enables seamless cow movement, the Comms team, responsible for seamless information exchange with our collars, and the Platform team, dedicated to board bring-up, sensor integration, and core algorithms.

We’re working with a modern tech stack that is dynamic and open to adapt to what works best for Halter and our product domains: On the backend, we primarily work with a mixture of typescript (NodeJS) and Kotlin, deployed as microservices using AWS. On the frontend we work with React Native. On the firmware side we use C++. While on the data side, we use Python. Additionally, we use Terraform to maintain our infrastructure as code.

As a team, we enjoy deep, complex technical conversations, pushing the boundaries of innovation, delivering cutting-edge solutions, and making a positive impact on the world. Our dynamic and collaborative work environment fosters creativity, encourages growth, and rewards excellence.

Still curious? Watch our team tell stories about why they enjoy working in our Marketing team at Halter.