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Halter is looking for a Head of Product Design to define and craft the future of our product experience. You will own everything from the design vision, strategy, and systems, to the finer details of the user experience, across our mobile and web applications.
You will lead and continue to grow and shape our team of product designers, partnering closely with product and engineering leaders, to solve complex problems for our customers who rely on Halter every minute of the day as their farm operating system.
This is not a hands-off design manager. We’re looking for a leader who operates at the intersection of strategy, leadership, craft, and execution - someone who leads from the front, sets direction, and sets the quality bar, so that Halter’s product experience continues to distance itself as globally best-in-class.
Why Halter?
Our Product and Mission:
Our solar-powered smart collars, paired with our digital software platform, make it possible for farmers to virtually fence and remotely shift their cattle, monitor each animal’s behaviour, reproduction and health 24/7, and track the production of pasture and other forages across their land, in real-time.
Our mission is to become the operating system for cattle farming, and revolutionise one of the world's most important industries that has operated much the same way, with the same constraints, for centuries. Halter makes our customers more profitable and more sustainable.
What you'll do:
- Define and evolve Halter’s product design vision, strategy, principles, and standards.
- Establish and scale a design system that enables speed, consistency, and quality across mobile and web (but mobile-first)
- Translate complex, real-world, data and jobs into clear, intuitive digital experiences.
- Own design quality as a competitive advantage and set a bar other companies aspire to.
- Work as a close partner to Product, Engineering, and Go-to-market leadership to shape product strategy, roadmaps, and outcomes.
- Influence what we build and how we build it, not just how it looks.
- Advocate for users while balancing business needs and technical constraints.
- Lead, manage, mentor, and grow a team of product designers across multiple product areas.
- Build a high-performance design culture grounded in craft, ownership, velocity and continuous improvement.
- Lift the performance ceiling of your team by leaning into and leveraging evolutions in technology, especially AI and automation.
- Set clear expectations and development paths for designers.
- Elevate design quality and clarity, raising the standard of excellence across every touchpoint.
- Stay close to the work - guiding key flows, reviewing designs, and unblocking teams.
- Drive strong design critique, experimentation, and data-informed decision making.
- Establish best practices across UX research, interaction design, visual design, and accessibility.
Who You Are:
- An experienced product designer with deep craft and strong product instincts.
- Experienced building and shaping design teams, ideally in a Head of Design role.
- Comfortable operating across levels, from vision and strategy down to execution and delivery.
- Experienced designing and scaling complex, data-rich products (e.g. real-time, geo-spatial, or systems-heavy domains). A bonus if you have experience in hardware-enabled software products.
- Experienced and highly effective working with Product and Engineering as peers, and cross-functionally with Go-to-market leaders.
- A champion of intelligence and automation, comfortable shaping a design function to benefit from AI tooling.
- Low ego. Opinionated and fearless, but pragmatic and precise. You are comfortable making hard trade-offs in fast-moving environments, with what’s best for Halter and our customers in mind.
- Genuinely motivated by real-world impact, and building something that will continue to revolutionise one of the world’s most important industries.
What sets us apart from most SaaS companies?
- Halter is real world in every sense. The product becomes a digital twin of land and animals. It guides animals, models land, monitors behaviours - all in real time. It is used by customers in the field - rain, snow or shine.
- Our customers might be data-hungry and AI-fluent, or this might be the first time they have used technology, especially a mobile app, in their business. The way in which we craft our experiences to cater to this spectrum of users is make or break.
- We literally get our hands dirty, working closely with our customers - you will talk to customers constantly, you will get feedback (good and bad), and you will definitely need gumboots - it is hard to beat gathering insights, while standing almost literally in the shoes of our farmers.
- We have a track record of taking risks and blazing new trails (which isn’t going to change). Much of what we do has no template or example to follow. Greenfield technical and design challenges are frequent, and our willingness to tackle them keeps us a step ahead of our competition.
- We have incredible engineers, who bring things to life with velocity and quality. As quick as we can bring a design concept to life, we can give ourselves the ability to test it, in the field. Calls and prototypes are useful, but our most important learnings come from seeing the real thing in action - nothing can replicate that.
Why our team loves working at Halter
At Halter, we’re committed to creating an environment where people thrive. We offer unlimited paid annual leave, as well as additional wellness days. Each year, every team member receives a $1,000 self-development budget to invest in whatever fuels their personal growth.
We offer six months of fully paid leave for primary caregivers and four weeks of fully paid leave for secondary caregivers, along with a range of additional family-friendly benefits. To support your wellbeing, we offer subsidised health insurance through Southern Cross.
And finally, everyone at Halter is an owner. Every employee is part of our stock ownership plan; when we succeed, you share in that success.
Our office-first approach
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.
We’re office first, not office only. This means that working from the office every day is our default setting, but we flex when needed. Your growth, learning, and 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.
We have a state-of-the-art, dog-friendly office in the heart of Auckland City and a test farm in Morrinsville. Delicious snacks and drinks are readily available.
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 and revolutionizing grazing with Halter. People join Halter to do meaningful work. Our team out-think, out-work and out-care. We’re committed to delivering real change in the world. We’re backed to deliver on a mission that matters by Tier 1 investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, DCVC, BOND, Blackbird, Promus Ventures, Rocket Lab’s Peter Beck and Icehouse Ventures.
Join our team
If this opportunity sounds like you, please apply below by sending your cover letter explaining why you’re excited about this role and working at Halter, along with your CV.
If you think you have what it takes but don’t necessarily meet every requirement on this job description, please still get in touch. We’d love to chat to see if you’ll be an epic fit!
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.
We may use artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support parts of the hiring process, such as reviewing applications, analyzing resumes, or assessing responses. These tools assist our recruitment team but do not replace human judgment. Final hiring decisions are ultimately made by humans. If you would like more information about how your data is processed, please contact us.
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