Job Background

Apollo Agriculture is the commercial farming platform for small-scale farmers that helps farmers maximize their profits. Apollo uses agronomic machine learning, remote sensing, and mobile phones to deliver financing, high-quality farm products, and optimized advice that can more than double farm profitability, starting in Kenya. Our team brings together technology and operations experience from The Climate Corporation (acquired for USD ~$1 Billion), ACRE, Google, and One Acre Fund. We value evangelical pursuit of mission with a pragmatic approach, humility in the face of challenge, active discussion of disagreements, and considerate listening.

Responsibilities

Apollo Agriculture is seeking a Software Engineer to help us change how African farmers access credit, customized advice, and farm inputs at radical scale. We are looking for someone with a strong understanding of computer science, excellent software engineering fundamentals and a genuine desire to grow. We’re looking for a person who can not only own a project and drive it to completion but who can also grow into being a leader at our company.

The Software Engineer will be responsible for contributing to our core software systems. We use software throughout all the operations of our company. From marketing to lending, from repayment to credit rating, we’re constantly automating and improving pieces of our company. We use Scala and Postgresql on the backend and develop our frontends for Android and React.

This position reports to the Head of Engineering.

Qualifications

- Strong understanding of computer science and excellent software engineering fundamentals.
- A strong commitment to learning whatever is required to get the job done. We don’t expect you to know everything, but we expect you to be able to learn what you need to on the job.
- Experience developing software with a team. You should be able to use `git rebase` comfortably and see the benefits of testable code.
- Comfort with building software in modern languages and frameworks. We mostly write scala on the backend, use Kotlin for our Android codebase, and write React on the front end. You don’t need to be experts in any of these, but you feel like you could comfortably acclimatize and pick these up quickly.
- Deep desire to work delivering credit and advice to smallholder farmers with all of the challenges that entails. While we don’t expect every hire to start with experience working with smallholder farmers, we expect every hire to go on field trips and to develop a deep working understanding of the lives of our customers. Note that we’re currently minimizing business travel because of covid, but will expect to return to business travel as we are able to safely.
- Bonus: Comfort building user interfaces that are highly user friendly and have well thought out designs.
- Bonus: Comfort with functional programming languages.