CloudOps Engineer - Software

About The Role

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 Dev Ops 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…