CloudOps Engineer - Software

About the Role

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, giving you a manager in your own timezone and keeping you close to the market. The engineering work, technical direction, and the team you belong to are all within R&D.

About eShepherd

eShepherd is virtual fencing for cattle. Solar-powered neckbands, a phone app, and a platform let 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 grown 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.

The Opportunity

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 customers and regulators, and new products are being built on the same foundation. The architecture that carried us to this point will not carry us forward, and this role exists to address that challenge.

• Investigate where time and money go under load, locate performance ceilings before customers do, identify which components will break first, and recommend improvements.
• Focus on query performance, data modeling at scale, ingest paths, caching, connection handling, storage strategy, regional topology, and failover.
• Help define and maintain platform standards: monitoring that catches problems before support tickets, incident response that produces fixes, and capacity planning for growth.
• Contribute to DevOps in this region, working with shared pipelines, infrastructure as code, environments, automation, and deployment tooling alongside the Melbourne and Hamilton teams.
• Support regional environment setups, releases, and automation updates to reflect multi-region operations.
• Participate in designing the next major platform extension, feeding insights from field measurements and observed behaviors into the process.
• Serve as R&D’s presence in North America, providing hands-on support during local business hours and acting as the engineering contact for customer success and operations teams.
• Bridge the gap between a globally designed platform and its real-world behavior on ranches, ensuring honest feedback informs development.

The cycle here is design, test, deploy, iterate. We measure real outcomes monthly and improve weekly rather than spending years building toward an uncertain launch.

Requirements

• Commercial experience running production cloud infrastructure on AWS at meaningful scale, including compute, managed databases, and container orchestration (RDS, ECS, EKS).
• Deep database competence with MySQL, covering schema design, query performance, indexing strategy, and tuning for growing datasets.
• Proven track record of making systems faster and more reliable, with clear documentation of measurements, changes, and outcomes.
• Experience with profiling, load testing, capacity planning, and cost-per-transaction analysis.
• Hands-on experience with monitoring, alerting, and incident response, including writing postmortems and implementing fixes.
• Infrastructure as code as your default way of working—no manual console configurations.
• Solid CI/CD and automation practices, covering build, test, and deployment workflows.
• Development capability in Python or Node.js to write necessary tooling and services.
• Familiarity with IoT architectures and protocols (MQTT, LTE-M, NB-IoT, or LoRa) and understanding of challenges posed by large fleets of constrained devices on cellular networks.
• Strong communication skills to connect teams across time zones and cultures.

Highly regarded experience includes multi-region deployments, data residency requirements, high-volume time series or telemetry workloads, DevSecOps practices, Terraform, Grafana, Prometheus, or embedded systems.

Skills

• You get things done, prioritizing progress over perfection.
• You think in numbers, using profilers, load tests, and query plans to drive decisions.
• You are comfortable working independently and can deliver well-supported findings after focused investigation.
• You thrive in async, cross-time-zone collaboration without losing visibility.
• You write clearly, ensuring findings and recommendations are understood and actionable.
• You understand the constraints of physical devices on batteries and patchy cellular coverage, shaping how you handle retries, backoff, connections, and acceptable outages.

Benefits

• 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.

Employment authorization in the U.S. is required. Visa sponsorship is not available for this role.