Vacancies at Apollo Agriculture

About the Role:
We are seeking an experienced DataOps engineer that will own the deployment, reliability, and availability of our data infrastructure at Apollo. We’re building a next-gen data warehouse, and we believe stable infrastructure and fundamental tools for data pipelining, transformation, and querying are vital to our success. Data is used to inform every decision made at Apollo, and drives every business function, from sales, customer support, repayment, marketing, finance, credit, and our field agent network spread across Kenya. As Apollo scales from 100,000 farmers in Kenya to millions across Africa, and grows our portfolio of products, our data warehouse will have to support both orders of magnitude more data and more complex business needs for those data.

Responsibilities:

• Design, implement, and deploy monitoring and alerting tools to measure data quality and availability while reducing downtime. We want to make failures transparent and easy to diagnose
• Help decide the team’s product roadmap by quantitatively determining which projects will have the highest ROI toward system efficiency and stability (e.g. monitoring which well-used queries or pipelines are inefficient and could be optimized)
• Deploy and manage tools that keep our data analysts and engineers extremely productive; you’ll have deep involvement in choosing tools and techniques in our data stack
• Implement and own the production and staging environments to provide isolation between development and production
• Track the biggest risks to our infrastructure and work with our team to mitigate them before they occur

You:

• Have experience in a DataOps/DevOps role
• Have written and deployed code to automate and provide resiliency to production systems
• Run production systems on AWS or an equivalent cloud infrastructure (Google Cloud, Azure)
• Experienced with relational databases and are deeply familiar with their performance considerations (indexing, data locality, etc.)
• Are deeply familiar with the software engineering work/deployment process
• Have excellent written & oral communication skills
• Are driven by the mission of transforming the livelihoods of smallholder farmers
• Are excited to spend time with our customers and learn from them

We:

• Are a collaborative team of smart and ambitious people who are dedicated to serving our customers
• Make magic happen to solve hard problems and always come with solutions when challenges arise
• Are comfortable taking risks that can result in radical scale, and understand that failures are opportunities to learn and improve
• Are considerate listeners and take the time to deeply understand and seek out ideas from the people around us, even when we disagree
• Offer a dynamic environment that fosters talent, collaboration and growth
• Take pride in our work and share the responsibility to see it through from conception to deployment
• Back up our talk with a competitive compensation and benefits package including equity
• Value autonomy, honesty, transparency, and respect
• Are excited to hear from you!

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About the Role:

We are seeking an experienced software engineer that will own the design and development of the next-gen data warehouse at Apollo. Data is used to inform every decision made at Apollo, and drives every business function, from sales, customer support, repayment, marketing, finance, credit, and our field agent network spread across Kenya. As Apollo scales from 100,000 farmers in Kenya to millions across Africa, and grows our portfolio of products, our data warehouse will have to support both orders of magnitude more data and more complex business needs for those data. To succeed in this role, you will need to design, develop, and maintain the infrastructure and tooling needed to scale both the data warehouse and its interfaces.
Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain scalable infrastructure for our data pipelines which deliver critical insights to decision makers across the company
• Develop and deploy tools to help users understand the state of data quality and pipelines. From less technical users to other tech teams, our data warehouse is relied on by everyone, and it’s important that these teams know when their data is up-to-date and pipelines are functioning.
• Develop and deploy tools to help users get insights from our data warehouse. We currently support both Tableau and Redash for self-serve access, but we’re always looking to make working with our data easier.
• Collaborate with our data science and analytics teams to ingest, clean, and monitor novel data sources that have business applications, such as satellite imagery, local weather and market tracking, and remote sensing data

You:

• Have designed, implemented, and shipped world-class software
• Have technical leadership experience; you’ve overseen others design, implement, and ship world-class software
• Have strong algorithmic and analytical problem-solving skills
• Can balance commercial priorities (shipping software) with doing things the right way; you know when it’s appropriate to incur or pay down technical debt
• Have the attention to detail required to harden multi-input, multi-stage, asynchronous systems against failure
• Are an expert in at least one programming language
• Experienced with relational databases and are familiar with the high-level performance considerations (indexing, data locality, etc.)
• Have excellent written & oral communication skills
• Are driven by the mission of transforming the livelihoods of smallholder farmers
• Are excited to spend time with our customers and learn from them

We:

• Are a collaborative team of smart and ambitious people who are dedicated to serving our customers
• Make magic happen to solve hard problems and always come with solutions when challenges arise
• Are comfortable taking risks that can result in radical scale, and understand that failures are opportunities to learn and improve
• Are considerate listeners and take the time to deeply understand and seek out ideas from the people around us, even when we disagree
• Offer a dynamic environment that fosters talent, collaboration and growth
• Take pride in our work and share the responsibility to see it through from conception to deployment
• Back up our talk with a competitive compensation and benefits package including equity
• Value autonomy, honesty, transparency, and respect
• Are excited to hear from you!

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About the Role:

• Apollo is seeking an experienced Head of Strategy and BD to help us build pathways from subsistence to commercial farming. This role will drive Apollo’s growth in several areas, including new product strategy, geographic expansion, and partnership development. This role is inherently cross-functional, touching on product and expansion strategy, agronomy, business development, and technology.
• The Head of Strategy and BD will work closely with Apollo’s CEO and Chief Customer Officer, as well as our product, engineering, agronomy, and operations teams, to evaluate opportunities and develop Apollo’s strategy in the following critical areas:
• Vertical scale: What crops, tools, services, and investments best enable Apollo’s customers to transition from subsistence maize farming to more profitable, more sustainable, and more commercial farming? How should Apollo evaluate, prioritize and actualize growth into these new crops, new products, and new services like market access for their crops, and on what timescale?
• Horizontal scale: How should Apollo expand, both within Kenya and internationally? What products are best suited to new regions, and how should product offerings be adapted to achieve product-market fit in new territories?
• Technology landscape: How should Apollo’s product and customer acquisition strategies evolve as our customers transition from feature phones to smartphones? How can Apollo best take advantage of opportunities brought about by smartphone adoption and other new technologies?
• Partnerships and Business Development: What partnerships can Apollo develop or deepen to increase both horizontal and vertical scale? How can Apollo expand existing partnerships, including with ag-input suppliers, local governments, insurance companies, and agro dealers to maximize our value proposition and achieve our growth goals?
• Success in this role will require deep strategic and analytical capabilities, excellent commercial judgment to prioritize new opportunities, and exceptional communication and relationship building skills. You’ll help guide Apollo’s growth priorities in the coming years and build the future of agriculture in Africa.

You Have:

• Significant experience in strategy and product development in a growing technology company. This could be in a strategy, growth, or product role working closely with a product team
• Significant experience building close working relationships and partnerships both within a company and externally
• Strong financial modeling skills to evaluate potential growth opportunities
• A demonstrated history of driving growth in a fast-paced environment
• The experience of knowing when something is “close enough” to done, to be valuable
• Exceptional written and verbal communication skills
• A background in management consulting is a pre
• An MBA (useful, but not required) or similar skillset

You Are:

• Entrepreneurial and ambitious, with a proven record of developing and executing strategic projects in a complex and dynamic environment
• A skilled relationship builder, who is excited to bring together multiple teams and partners to understand and solve hard problems
• Passionate about agriculture and sustainability
• A considerate listener who takes the time to deeply understand customers, teammates, and partners
• Incredibly curious