Founding Software Engineer - Insights

InnerPlant is the place for curious people who want to create innovative traits that harness plant physiology and unlock data at scale to boost global agricultural yields and sustainability. We’re backed by industry giant John Deere and other veteran venture capitalists and are poised for growth as we develop crops that can tell us what they need by turning plants into living sensors.

If you’re a dreamer and an optimist, someone who believes they can change the world and want to take action to leave a positive lasting impact - this is the opportunity for you.

Job Description

Our company has made great strides in our work to create plants that generate an optical signal when stressed and detect that signal from various imaging platforms. We are now expanding our work to make that signal actionable for farmers. The successful candidate for this position will help design, build and maintain the digital infrastructure necessary to relay our plants’ signals as insights back to the farm. 

Goals

• Architect, build, and maintain the infrastructure that catalogs InnerPlant’s remotely sensed detections of plant fluorescence
• Integrate our detection signals with third party data and APIs
• Vet and source software vendors suppliers as needed, making build, buy, or partner decisions in partnership with Product and R&D

Requirements

Skills Summary

• Software: Python-based ORMs and REST API frameworks, JavaScript, experience with common development tools and services, such as version control software, package managers, and CI/CD pipelines
• Infrastructure: Terraform, AWS, Postgres 
• Domain : Geospatial libraries (e.g. GDAL, rasterio, OGR, shapely, geopandas, sf, and terra for raster and vector analytics), image data processing
• Interpersonal: Excellent written and verbal communication skills, ability to create a healthy engineering culture and relaying technical concepts to non-engineers 

Education, Experience, and Attributes

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or related field
• At least 5 years of experience building software, ideally full stack, with a focus on backend components
• Long term mindset and outlook toward building maintainable systems
• Ability to teach and uplevel colleagues eager to learn but with limited training in formal software engineering 
• Intellectual curiosity and a desire to learn about remote sensing, plant biology, and the global food system
• Thoughtfulness to create engineering principles for a small organization and flexibility to adapt them as we grow
• Ability to work both independently and collaboratively as part of a team

Preferred skills:

• Computer vision algorithms
• Farm equipment and farm management service APIs 
• Satellite tasking
• Mechanistic and/or statistical crop and pathogen modeling
• Project management/reasonably reliable estimation creation  
• GIS experience

Benefits

The US base salary range for this position is $180,000 - $220,000 + benefits. Within the range, individual pay is determined by factors including job-related skills, experience, and relevant education or training.

InnerPlant provides an amazing opportunity to work on some of the hardest problems facing humanity and help design the agricultural systems of the future. In addition to working with a fun team, we offer competitive compensation, insurance benefits, and flexible time-off.

InnerPlant provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws.

This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training.