Principal Supplier Quality Engineer

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 Halter’s component suppliers are predominantly based across Asia. The components they produce have to be right before they ever reach our contract manufacturers. When something is wrong, we need someone on the ground who can get to the root cause fast, push through to a real fix, and prevent it from happening again. The Supplier Quality Principal is Halter’s senior technical authority embedded in Asia. You’ll lead highly technical supplier audits, own complex quality problem-solving at our suppliers, and work directly with both suppliers and Halter’s design teams to ensure that what comes off a supplier’s production line meets the standard we set. You’ll operate with a high degree of autonomy, covering a portfolio of suppliers across the region and acting as the technical bridge between our Asia supply base and the Halter team in Auckland. This is not a compliance role. Ticking audit checkboxes and filing reports is not what this job is about. The best person for this role is someone who goes deep: who can walk a production line and immediately identify what’s controlling quality and what isn’t, who can sit with a supplier’s engineers and work through a failure mode from first principles, and who knows the difference between a corrective action that actually solves a problem and one that just looks good on paper. You’ll report to the Head of Supplier Quality and work closely with Halter’s hardware design and operations teams. When there’s a quality issue in Asia that needs solving, you’re the person we call. You’ll be measured on the technical quality of audits, the speed and effectiveness of issue resolution at suppliers, and your ability to build supplier capability over time. What You’ll Do Technical Supplier Auditing • Lead technically rigorous audits of Halter’s component suppliers across Asia, going well beyond system compliance to assess process control, measurement capability, and the reliability of how suppliers actually build and inspect parts. • Identify the real drivers of quality performance at a supplier, not just the documented procedures, and develop clear, prioritised findings that distinguish between critical risks and cosmetic gaps. • Conduct pre-qualification audits of new suppliers, assessing their technical capability and readiness to meet Halter’s design and quality requirements before commitments are made. • Run periodic surveillance audits to verify that corrective actions have been implemented effectively and that quality performance is being sustained. • Develop and continuously improve Halter’s audit methodology and supplier assessment criteria, ensuring audits capture what actually matters for component quality. Technical Problem Solving • Own the resolution of complex quality issues at suppliers, using first-principles analysis to identify root cause and drive effective corrective actions rather than superficial fixes. • When a production failure or OQC rejection occurs, lead rapid on-site analysis with supplier engineers and Halter’s design team to understand the failure mode, assess risk to in-flight inventory, and define the fastest path to resolution. • Work with suppliers to improve their process controls, measurement systems, and inspection methods so that quality issues are caught and corrected at source, not downstream. • Coach supplier engineering teams to develop their own capability for root cause analysis and corrective action, building their ability to self-solve rather than depend on Halter for every issue. • Escalate issues clearly and early when resolution is taking too long, a supplier is not engaging in good faith, or a quality risk to production is emerging. Quality Assurance Specifications • Implement and maintain Halter’s quality assurance specifications at suppliers, ensuring specifications are understood, accepted, and consistently applied across the production process. • Work with Halter’s hardware design team and the Head of Supplier Quality to refine QA specifications where field experience, audit findings, or supplier feedback reveals gaps or ambiguity. • Ensure that when designs evolve, updated specifications are communicated to suppliers, implemented correctly, and re-validated before affected parts re-enter supply. • Challenge specifications that are unclear, unmeasurable, or misaligned with what suppliers can realistically control, bringing engineering and operations teams to a better standard. Part Approval and Ongoing Compliance • Support supplier-side part approval activities, ensuring new and revised components are formally validated against Halter’s specifications before production release. • Maintain a clear picture of approval status and open quality issues across the suppliers in your portfolio, tracking corrective actions to closure and flagging risks to supply continuity. • Collaborate with the Head of Contract Manufacturing Quality when parts that pass supplier OQC fail IQC at our contract manufacturers, working to determine whether root cause sits with the supplier process, the OQC criteria, or the incoming inspection. Supplier Development • Build genuine working relationships with quality and engineering counterparts at key suppliers, creating the trust and technical credibility that allows hard conversations to happen fast. • Identify where suppliers have systemic capability gaps and develop structured improvement plans that address root cause, not symptoms. • Share Halter’s standards, expectations, and technical knowledge with suppliers in a way that builds their capability over time rather than creating dependency. What You Bring • 15 or more years of experience in supplier quality or manufacturing quality for complex electromechanical hardware, with a proven track record of solving technically difficult quality problems at suppliers. • Deep manufacturing and process engineering knowledge. You understand how parts are made, what drives process variation, and how to identify whether a supplier’s process is actually in control. • Exceptional audit capability. You conduct audits that go beneath the surface, uncover the real quality risks, and produce findings that drive meaningful improvement. • Strong first-principles thinking. When you see a quality failure, you work back to the actual root cause, not the nearest plausible explanation. • Experience with QA specification development and the ability to assess whether a specification is clear, measurable, and correctly implemented at a supplier. • High proficiency in both English and Mandarin (written, verbal, and reading). You can work directly with Chinese engineers and leadership without translation. • Comfortable operating autonomously across a portfolio of suppliers. You manage your own priorities, escalate the right things at the right time, and don’t need close supervision to stay effective. • Firm, fair, and direct with suppliers. You hold a high standard, push back on inadequate corrective actions, and maintain a relationship that is professional and productive even when conversations are hard. • Willing to travel regularly across APAC. A significant portion of your time will be on-site at suppliers. • A Master’s degree in Engineering or a related technical discipline is preferred. 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, tackli