Head of Industrial Design

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, Bessemer Venture Partners, BOND, DCVC, Blackbird, Promus Ventures, Rocket Lab’s Peter Beck and Icehouse ventures.

To find out more, visit our LinkedIn & Instagram.

About the role

Every Halter device lives outside, on an animal, for years. It gets rained on, baked in the sun, dragged through mud and leaned on by a 700kg cow. It also has to be fitted by a farmer or rancher in a busy yard with a few hundred more animals waiting, sit comfortably on each animal throughout the seasons, and be recognisable as Halter from a distance.

In Ag, form follows function but that doesn't mean our farmers can't be proud of their kit. We aspire to set the design standard for Ag-tech globally; both out of the box and after 5 years of hard work alongside our farmers.

Industrial design is a new team at Halter, and we're hiring a Head of Industrial Design to build it. We're growing the hardware organisation so we can develop multiple new products in parallel - industrial design is a critical piece of that puzzle. Each one needs to be tough, comfortable for the animal, delightful for our farmers, affordable enough to make millions of, and beautiful on top of all that.

You'll report directly to the VP of Hardware & Platform and work closely with the leaders of Hardware Engineering, Hardware Delivery, and Reliability & Failure Analysis. You'll own the form, feel and physical experience of every new product Halter makes, and you'll build a world class team to do it.

This is a hands-on role, it's being built from scratch. Especially early on, you'll be sketching and making rough models yourself, and spending as much time on farms as in the studio. Our devices are the most visible thing about Halter on a farm, and we want them to be part of our advantage.

Most of all, we’re looking for someone who loves creating, has no ego about where the best idea comes from, and gets deep satisfaction watching an early sketch turn into a novel product redefining one of the globe's biggest industries. We’ve experienced that feeling with our collars and we’re ready to do it again.

We're looking for the best talent, wherever in the world that might be. If you're excited by the opportunity and open to making New Zealand home, we'd love to chat.

What you'll do

Own the design of every Halter hardware product

• Own form, colour, and finish across all future Hardware innovation. Strong collaboration with our product design engineers and input on ergonomics and materials.
• Define and hold a Halter industrial design language that scales across collars and future products, so a Halter device is recognisable at a glance. It must compliment our wider branding and product design languages.
• Judge feasibility the way the best designers do: on function first, then aesthetics, materials, and what it will cost to make a million of them.
• Use AI to accelerate the work. Explore more directions, iterate faster, get to great sooner, and bring the rest of the hardware team along with you.

Design for the animal and the farmer

• Treat animal comfort and welfare as a critical design input: smooth, rounded contact surfaces, weight kept to a minimum, and nothing that rubs, catches or chafes over years of wear.
• Spend time in yards and on farms watching how a collar sits, how a device gets fitted, and how a farmer handles it in a hurry with cold, wet hands. Design for fitment. A farmer might fit hundreds of devices in a day.

Get your hands dirty

• Sketch and make things yourself. Rough form models in foam, card and quick 3D prints are yours. Higher-fidelity prototypes, machined parts and appearance models get built with the mechanical engineers and our prototyping partners.
• Take prototypes to the field. Evaluate colour, material and finish under the sun, in the mud and on the animals they're built for.
• Explore materials relentlessly alongside engineering. Push our suppliers and mechanical engineers on polymers, overmoulds, textures and finishes that survive years of weather and abuse and still look good doing it.

Partner deeply with engineering

• Work shoulder to shoulder with our mechanical and electrical engineers. Understand their constraints (solar area, antenna keep-outs, battery volume, sealing) and design with them rather than around them.
• Own a pragmatic cosmetic standard. Set the spec for finish, texture, colour and parting lines, and sign off first-off tooling samples and production parts against it.
• Bring design into the room at the earliest stage, so form and function are decided together.

Build the function with great judgement

• Hire and grow a lean team of exceptional industrial designers as needed.
• Brief and manage outside studios where it makes sense.
• Set the bar for craft at Halter! High bar and a low ego.

What you'll bring

Core experience

• Work that has hit mass production! You’ve gone from theory to mass production and made trade-offs along the way. Show us sketches, prototypes and production parts rather than just renders. As a result you’ve got a solid understanding of manufacturing and design for manufacturability. Injection moulding, overmoulding, metals, textures and finishes.
• Experience designing for tough environments: outdoor, rugged, wearable, automotive, marine or similar. Products that get wet, dropped, baked and knocked around.
• An obsession with how things are made and how they work. Plus you’re excited by creation. Bringing new products into the physical world, delights you and the people using it!

• Exceptional sketching, surfacing and form development skills. You think with your hands as well as on screen!

• You've led designers and you want to do it again.
• Strong communication, written, verbal and visual. You can take a room of engineers, farmers and executives through a design decision and bring them with you.
• Low ego, highly collaborative, and willing to play for the front of the jersey. You'd rather the product win than your idea, and you're as happy developing someone elses idea.

• You're comfortable in a founder-led business. You take feedback incredibly well, make your case when it matters, and are happy to be convinced otherwise. Strong opinions are loosely held.
• You love learning, and you're excited by AI and the part it plays in accelerating world-class design work. You're already using it to explore more, faster.
• No agricultural background needed. We'll get you onto farms early and often.

Nice to have

• Wearables, or anything else designed to be worn on a body, human or otherwise.
• Solar-powered or energy-constrained products, where surface area is a design input.

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.

Why our team loves working at Halter:

• Work that genuinely matters. Every now and again a company comes along that transforms an entire industry and leaves the world in a better place. Our team gets to be part of something truly meaningful, helping farmers improve their livelihoods, spend more time with their families, and build more sustainable operations.
• Spectacular people solving hard problems. Our culture is designed for talented people to do work that changes lives. The team is filled with diverse, kind, and driven people who push each other to do their best work. You'll be thrown into the deep end, tackling complex challenges and building something tangible that solves real problems.
• You'll grow here. Autonomy, mastery, and learning define how we work. You'll have the freedom to work on interesting problems, master new skills, and continuously develop yourself, both through your role and our personal growth fund.
• This isn't easy, and we love that it's hard. Working at Halter will be the most rewarding and the most challenging work of your life. We move fast, take bold bets, and work hard to reshape an entire industry. As one team member put it: "Joining Halter is a bit like strapping yourself to a rocket ship, but it's an epic journey to be a part of!"