| Location | Kansas City, Kansas |
| Website | https://careers.gallagher.com |
eShepherd, Gallagher Animal Management | Kansas City | Full time
You would sit in the eShepherd R&D team, working day to day with the Software Team Lead for Cloud and Apps and the engineers in Melbourne and Hamilton. Your reporting line runs locally to the Regional Lead for North America, which gives you a manager in your own timezone and keeps you close to the market. The engineering work, the technical direction and the team you belong to are all R&D.
eShepherd is virtual fencing for cattle. Solar powered neckbands, a phone app, and a platform that lets a farmer draw a paddock on a screen and have the mob standing in it by morning.
We run on farms in more than twenty countries, from the Burdekin in Queensland to South Dakota prairie, from Texas brush country to Hawkes Bay hill country. We have gone from startup to scale up inside Gallagher, the New Zealand company that has been making farm fencing for 88 years. We move at startup pace with the reach and patience of a business that has seen a few cycles.
Our research and development runs out of Melbourne and Hamilton, and North America is now one of our fastest growing markets.
Every animal wearing an eShepherd neckband talks to our platform continuously. The device count is growing by orders of magnitude, the platform is expanding into new regions to keep data close to the customers and regulators who care about it, and new products are being built on top of the same foundation. The architecture that carried us to here will not carry us to where we are going, and this role exists to work that out.
A lot of this role is investigation. You would find out where the time and the money actually go under load, locate the ceilings before customers do, work out which part will break first, and come back to the R&D team in Melbourne with the evidence and a recommended way forward. Query performance and data modelling at scale, ingest paths, caching, connection handling, storage strategy, regional topology and failover are all territory you would be digging into.
You would help hold the platform to what good looks like. Monitoring that catches problems before a support ticket does, incident response that produces a fix rather than a restart, and capacity planning that means growth is a plan instead of a surprise.
You would be part of our DevOps function, extending it into this region. The pipelines, the infrastructure as code, the environments, the automation and the deployment tooling are shared with the engineers in Melbourne and Hamilton, and you would build and maintain them alongside that team rather than running a separate version of your own. When a regional environment needs standing up, when a release needs to reach infrastructure on this side of the world, or when the automation needs to understand that we now run in more than one place, that work is yours.
You would contribute to the next major extension of the platform. New products are coming onto this foundation and the scaling work in front of us is design work, not maintenance. You would be in those conversations, feeding in what you have measured and what you have seen behave badly in the field.
You would also be R&D's presence in North America, and the voice from the other side of the world. When something breaks at nine in the morning in Kansas, the Melbourne engineers are asleep, and you are the one with hands on the system. When our North American customer success and operations teams need answers, you are the engineer in their timezone who can get them. A team designing a platform from Melbourne cannot see how it behaves on a ranch in Texas, and you are how they find out. Carrying that back honestly, including the parts nobody wants to hear, is a real part of the job.
The cycle here is design, test, deploy, iterate. We would rather measure something real this month and improve it every week than spend a year building toward a launch that may never happen.
You get sh*t done. You would rather instrument the system, find out what is actually slow, and fix it, than argue about what might be slow in theory. Progress over perfection is how we work, and it should be how you already work.
You think in numbers. You reach for a profiler, a load test or a query plan before you reach for an opinion, and you can tell the difference between a system that is genuinely at its limit and one that is badly configured.
You are comfortable being the only person in your building who does this job, working independently on a problem for a week and coming back with something well supported. Working across a fourteen hour time difference is normal to you, and you know how to be async without going quiet.
You can write. A finding that reaches Melbourne as a clear explanation with data behind it changes what gets built, and the same finding delivered badly disappears.
You care about what sits underneath the abstraction. There are physical devices on real animals at the far end of every request you serve, and they run on batteries and patchy cellular coverage. That changes how you think about retries, backoff, connection handling and what counts as an acceptable outage.
Commercial experience running production cloud infrastructure on AWS at meaningful scale, including compute, managed databases and container orchestration. RDS, ECS and EKS are what we use today.
Deep database competence with MySQL, covering schema design, query performance, indexing strategy and the tuning work that keeps a production system healthy while the data underneath it multiplies.
A track record of making systems faster and more reliable, with the ability to describe what you measured, what you changed and what it moved. Profiling, load testing, capacity planning and cost per transaction should all be familiar ground.
Real experience with monitoring, alerting and incident response. You have been on the wrong end of an outage, you have written the postmortem, and you have shipped the change that stopped it recurring.
Infrastructure as code as your default way of working. If it was clicked together in a console, it does not exist.
Solid CI/CD and automation practice, covering build, test and deployment workflows, along with enough development capability in Python or Node.js to write the tooling and services the job needs.
Some familiarity with IoT architectures and protocols, whether MQTT, LTE-M, NB-IoT or LoRa, and an understanding of what large fleets of constrained devices on cellular networks do to a backend.
Strong communication, because a large part of the value of this role sits in how well you connect two teams on opposite sides of the world.
Experience with multi region deployments, data residency requirements, high volume time series or telemetry workloads, DevSecOps practices, Terraform, Grafana or Prometheus, or embedded systems, would all be highly regarded.
What we ship changes how farmers live. A bull breeder in Western Australia whose cows and calves have never done better. A grazier moving cattle on his Taranaki river flat from a deck chair in Wanaka. A Texas rancher who has freed up his labour and manages country more intensively than he ever has.
Uptime is an animal welfare question here. Farmers trust this system with livestock, and the reliability you are responsible for is part of why that trust holds.
You would be joining a team that is number 8 wired, where resourcefulness beats resources and the default question is whether we can rather than why we cannot. Feedback runs in both directions, disagreements happen in the open, and the pace is real.
We know great engineers have options, so we invest in creating an environment where people can do their best work.
We offer:
Competitive salary and performance-based incentives
Health, dental and vision insurance
Life, accident, disability and critical illness coverage
401(k) with employer contributions
Employee Assistance and wellness programs
Modern tools and technology to support your work
Opportunities for professional development and career growth
A collaborative engineering culture with global reach and startup energy
A sneak-peek into what we do: Introducing: eShepherd Virtual Fencing
Whilst we are pretty keen to get this role filled, we know it's crucial we find the right fit for our organization, so this advert will remain open until we've nailed that brief. If this sounds like a bit of you then we'd love to hear from you.