Principal Product Designer - Design Systems

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,...

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.

How do you represent a living, literally breathing farm in an app and then let someone control it from their pocket?
With Halter's solar-powered collars and software, farmers can fence and shift cattle, manage their pasture and the environment more effectively and monitor animal health, all from one app in real time. There is no reference for this, no pattern library, no interaction models to borrow from. We are inventing them.
A farm is alive and always moving: animals, pasture, weather, all changing by the minute. Our job is to turn that into something a farmer can read at a glance and act on with total confidence. The stakes are physical and the visual and interaction bar is extremely high, this is a farmer's entire farm in their pocket, it should feel like it. Beautifully crafted and a joy to use, every day, for years.
We're looking for a Staff Product Designer to lead the design of a significant area of the product experience at Halter. You'll take on some of our hardest problems and help set the bar for what Halter's product experience should feel like.
Design at Halter is high agency and high impact. We help define what we should build and why, we spend real time with farmers, ranchers and graziers in the field, and we shape where Halter goes next.
This role is based in our Auckland, New Zealand HQ, relocation and visa assistance is provided.
Set, own and advance our design foundations across mobile and web.
Set the standard for craft at Halter, and make that standard usable through principles, guidance and worked examples that raise the quality of what every team ships.
Shape the technical architecture and system structure alongside engineers.
Treat the system as a product with real customers. Set its direction, prioritise what to build next based on what designers and engineers actually need.
Give teams a clear point of view on which pattern to reach for and why.
Turn our field conditions into standards the system carries by default: legibility, target sizes, clarity at a glance.
Work alongside teams to spot what's working across new product surfaces and promote it into documented, reusable foundations. Decide what earns the right to be a pattern and what's better left a considered one-off.
Raise the craft of the designers around you through feedback, reviews and mentorship, and champion the system across product, engineering and design leadership.

8+ years designing digital products, with significant time spent designing and building design systems at scale.
Exceptional visual craft and command of typography, layout, spacing, colour, accessibility, interaction and motion design.
Proven experience shipping a design system with engineers. You know how tokens and component libraries are structured in code, and you've built and maintained the Figma to code connection.
A portfolio showing both foundational systems work, and concrete high-craft experiences built with it.
Not just taste, but conviction and the language to make your judgment explicit, teachable and useful to others.
A track record of coaching other designers and raising quality around you, and the presence to build alignment and defend an opinionated decision.