Head of Engineering & Data

Job description

# **About the Company** Nuru Solutions is an agricultural data company. We combine satellite imagery, weather data, ground-truth field data, and machine learning to give insurers and lenders the farm-level intelligence they need to serve smallholder farmers well, including yield prediction, crop monitoring, and risk profiling across Kenya, Malawi, and Somalia. Our work has served tens of thousands of farmers, and our mission is to empower farmers and pastoralists with the climate resilience and access to finance they need to thrive. ## **About the Role** We are seeking a technical leader to architect and execute the technology strategy that will power Nuru's growth. You will transform our core web platform into a suite of scalable, multi-channel products, including field-team mobile tools and farmer outreach channels, and lead all aspects of technology, data, and product development. You will be a core part of the team that turns our data and models into scalable, revenue-generating products. This is a leadership role first: you will spend most of your time setting direction, unblocking, and growing the team. But you remain hands-on and technical enough to make the hard architectural calls yourself, strategize with the CEO, translate client and farmer needs into technical specs, and hold a high bar on what ships. The role has a clear growth path as the company scales. Your first-year scorecard is unambiguous: automate our ML and data pipelines to reduce human-in-the-loop refinement, improve margins, upgrade to commercial-grade infrastructure, and enable the platform to scale without linear headcount growth while keeping our models credible, our data governed, and our IP secure. ## **What You Will Do** **CORE RESPONSIBILITIES:** 1. **Technology & Architectural Strategy** - Lead all development of tech, data, software, and web-based products, including liaising with external teams when necessary. - Own, define, plan, and execute Nuru’s end-to-end technology vision and roadmap in alignment with business objectives and growth strategy. - Lead the implementation of Nuru’s database and cloud architecture, model development, and data pipeline development, including satellite index integration, ML models, and climate data pipelines. - Design scalable, cost-efficient, secure, and resilient systems for data ingestion, storage, analytics, and distribution, with cost discipline appropriate to an early-stage company on a defined path to breakeven. - Lead the automation of Nuru's ML and data pipelines to reduce manual intervention, improve unit economics, and allow the platform to scale without proportional headcount growth. - Design and lead software development cycles from prototyping to deployment, ensuring rapid iteration based on user feedback. - Ensure integration of farmer- and field-facing channels (SMS, WhatsApp, mobile) with backend analytics systems. - Prioritize product development based on client needs, available resources, and Nuru's business strategy. 2. **Product Development and Execution:** - Champion collaboration with the CEO and Operations lead to ensure technical feasibility and operational fit of product innovation - Lead the full software development evolution for Nuru's core web app and future platforms, from prototyping and iteration to deployment and monitoring. - Direct the development and integration of core technical capabilities, including ML models for yield prediction and risk profiling - Stay up to date on AI/ML and other relevant advancements in yield prediction, risk profiling, and the agricultural and insuretech industries to inform future Nuru product offerings. 3. **IP Custody & Engineering Standards** - Own cloud environments and IP custody standards. All work - internal and contractor - is developed, stored, and accepted within Nuru-controlled infrastructure, verified at every milestone as a hard acceptance condition. - Structure external engagements as fixed-fee, milestone-based task orders with explicit acceptance criteria, and enforce them. - Maintain high standards of code quality, system reliability, and performance through robust documentation, testing, and DevOps practices. 4. **Data and Analytics** - Define and own the company’s data strategy, including the creation of robust automated pipelines for the collection, processing, and analysis of diverse datasets; satellite, weather, and ground-truth field data. - Full responsibility to develop, implement, and monitor a scalable data pipeline and systems to maintain the utmost data quality, integrity, and usability: i.e. validate satellite/GIS/weather data accuracy and ground-truthing processes. - Uphold and operationalize Nuru's two-stage model validation protocol, ensuring internal holdout results and independent field-validation results are tracked separately, and only approved metrics are reported externally. - Ensure data accuracy is continuously measured and transparently tracked across the company, including validation of satellite, GIS, and weather data against ground-truthing processes. - Champion integration of partner and field-team inputs to ensure smooth incorporation of external datasets. 5. **Team Management** - Recruit, mentor, and manage Nuru’s tech and data teams, fostering a culture of innovation, collaboration, and accountability. - Build capacity in-house for critical technical and data analysis skills, , reducing dependency on external contractors over time. - Supervise dev and data teams, including internal and external teams; ensure clear communication of blockers to the CEO and implications on implementation workflows to the operations lead. 6. **Cross-Functional & Strategic Leadership** - Partner with the CEO to evaluate new market opportunities, inform strategic decisions with technical feasibility, and represent technology in investor communications. - Partner with the operations lead to define data requirements for field collection, provide technical inputs for grant and investor reporting, and ensure smooth operational integration of new features. - Act as the key technical advisor to the leadership team, translating complex technical concepts into clear business implications for non-technical stakeholders. - Support business development and marketing efforts by providing technical depth in client and partner discussions, demonstrations, and content. - Legal and Compliance: Ensure compliance with data privacy, security, and protection laws in all jurisdictions where Nuru operates. ## **What You Have** **Must-Haves (Required)** - 7+ years in software engineering, with 3+ years leading engineers. You have owned architecture and delivery for production systems at scale, not just prototypes. - Deep, hands-on software development and system design expertise. You can still read a pull request, make an architectural call, and set technical standards, even though your primary job is to lead. - A proven track record of building and scaling cloud-native platforms (AWS preferred), including data pipelines, APIs, and multi-channel product delivery across web, mobile, and messaging. - Experience shipping AI/ML-powered products. You do not need to build models yourself, but you must be fluent enough to architect systems around them, work credibly with data scientists, and set the bar for how models move from notebook to production. - Demonstrated ability to translate ambiguous client and field needs into technical specs and a sequenced roadmap under real resource constraints. - Experience hiring, mentoring, and managing engineers and blended engineering/data teams. **Strongly Preferred** - Experience in agritech, insurtech, fintech, or geospatial and remote-sensing products. - Familiarity with GIS and satellite data or a demonstrated track record of ramping quickly into an unfamiliar data domain. - Startup or early-stage experience; comfortable being hands-on and building structure where little exists yet. ## **How You Work** - You lead rather than default to doing everything yourself, but you are never far from the code. - You bridge engineering and data: able to earn the trust of data scientists while keeping the team focused on shippable, reliable product. - You treat IP custody, model governance, and documentation as professional standards, not overhead. - You communicate clearly, hold your own in investor, partner, and client conversations, and translate technical depth for non-technical audiences.