Senior Developer

Why this role exists

Agora's first commercial rollout is underway. We have partnerships with major processors, pilot farms turning into paying farms, and a platform that needs to grow up fast to meet what's coming.

Right now our development strength sits in mobile. We need someone senior to take ownership of the web side — the customer and staff-facing applications, the frontend architecture, and the standards we build to. This is a role with genuine gaps to fill, not a seat on an established team.

About Agora

Agora was born from a simple idea: smarter farming starts with better data.

Built out of Deosan's two decades of dairy innovation, Agora began as an internal project to automate chemical and milk monitoring on farms. Deosan's team saw how much time was wasted on manual checks, paperwork, and reactive problem-solving — and decided to fix it. What started as a solution for a handful of trial farms quickly became a platform with national potential.

Working alongside Scopious, a New Zealand IoT technology company, the team developed a secure wireless system that gathers, stores, and delivers live data from milk vats, and increasingly, across the entire farm. No hard wiring. No manual uploads. Just reliable telemetry built for real conditions.

We sit inside Terravest alongside Deosan and DTS Refrigeration; hygiene, refrigeration, and telemetry joined up into one view of milk quality from teat to tanker. That means the data you work with doesn't sit in isolation. It connects to physical plant, chemistry, and service teams who act on it.

We're not a big-tech shop and we don't pretend to be. The upside is that you'll see your work reach real farms, and you won't spend your week in process.

What makes this different

Most web development jobs move data between a database and a screen. This one starts with a sensor bolted to a milk vat on a farm somewhere in the Waikato, in the rain, at 4am.

That changes the engineering problems. Connectivity is imperfect. Readings arrive late, out of order, or not at all. A false alert wakes a farmer up for nothing; a missed one costs them a grade or a whole vat. Peak milk means load arrives in waves, not evenly. The interface has to be readable on a cracked phone screen with one hand free.

If you find those constraints interesting rather than annoying, you'll enjoy this.

What you'll do

• Design, build, and ship features across the full stack - frontend, backend, and data layer
• Own the architecture of our web platform, and set the frontend standards we build to
• Turn live telemetry into interfaces that farmers and processors trust and actually want to open
• Write clean, tested, maintainable code, and review your teammates' work
• Investigate and fix production issues, particularly around data reliability and alerting
• Work alongside our mobile developers so web and app feel like one product, not two
• Collaborate with Scopious and external contractors on the boundary between device and platform
• Work directly with farmers, processors, and the Deosan and DTS teams to turn rough problems into working software
• Mentor developers and lift the engineering standard across the team
• Contribute to technical planning and help shape what we build next

What we're looking for

You're properly senior. You've got areas where you're genuinely expert and you back your judgement in them — but you're just as happy working outside them, because in a team our size the interesting problems rarely stay in one lane.

Required:

• 5+ years building and shipping production web applications
• Strong across the stack - confident in a modern frontend framework and the backend behind it
• Solid database skills: schema design, query performance, and knowing when the problem isn't the database
• Experience designing and consuming REST or GraphQL APIs
• Cloud platform experience (Azure, AWS, or GCP) and CI/CD pipelines
• Proven ability to take a vague requirement to production with minimal hand-holding
• Clear communicator - can explain a technical tradeoff to a farmer, a processor, or a CEO
• Right to work in New Zealand, or eligibility for an Accredited Employer Work Visa

Useful, not essential:

• Time-series data, IoT telemetry, or event-driven systems
• Containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Monitoring and observability tooling - Grafana or similar
• Experience mentoring developers or leading a small technical workstream
• Any exposure to agritech, or to dairy specifically

We don't require a tertiary ICT qualification. If you're self-taught and can point to production systems you've built, that counts for more with us than a transcript.

A note on curiosity

This one matters to us.

We're after someone who likes this stuff, not just someone who's good at it. There's a difference, and it usually shows.

The people who do well here tend to be the ones who tinker - who pull something apart to see how it works, who'd rather automate a nuisance than tolerate it, who keep half an eye on what's changing in the field. Not because we expect your evenings, but because that instinct is what turns a working system into a good one.

What success looks like

We'll trust you to:

• Set the direction for our web technology - and keep it moving
• Ship web applications that farmers and staff actually like using
• Bring consistency to our frontend architecture and the way we build things
• Work well alongside the people handling mobile, automation, infrastructure, and integrations
• Have a real say in the technical decisions that affect the whole platform
• Share what you know, and make the engineers around you better
• Take problems from "here's an idea" through to "it's live"
• Bring sound judgement, a level head, and some genuine energy to the place

What we offer

• $120,000 – $130,000 depending on experience
• 3.5% KiwiSaver employer contribution
• Hybrid working
• $1,000 annual professional development budget
• A platform in its first commercial year, with the scope that comes with that
• A team that ships, and a codebase you won't be embarrassed by

How to apply

Send your CV and a short note about something you've built that you're proud of to [email protected].

No cover letter needed. We reply to everyone.

We're reviewing applications as they arrive and may appoint before the listing closes - so apply early rather than perfectly.