Machine Learning Specialist

About the role

We are looking for a senior Machine Learning Specialist to lead the end‑to‑end development, deployment and governance of our agricultural intelligence models. You will transform our informal ML practice into a rigorous, auditable system that serves insurers, lenders and agribusinesses across multiple African markets.

Key responsibilities

• Own the full ML lifecycle – design, train, validate, deploy and monitor production models for crop health, yield prediction, risk profiling and other analytics.
• Build and maintain reproducible, version‑controlled ML pipelines on AWS, ensuring models are independently reproducible.
• Expand model coverage from maize to beans, sorghum, potatoes and horticultural crops, and generalise models across diverse agro‑ecological zones.
• Implement and enforce the Model Validation Protocol, produce validation and sign‑off reports, and lead quarterly governance reviews.
• Define and oversee ground‑truth data collection using KoboToolbox, drone imagery and field surveys, and develop robust training approaches for sparse data.
• Establish pre‑delivery quality checks for client‑facing datasets, detecting data integrity issues and distribution anomalies.

Required profile

• Proven senior‑level experience leading ML projects in production environments.
• Strong background in agricultural or remote‑sensing data contexts.
• Demonstrated ability to design reproducible pipelines and enforce model governance.
• Experience managing ground‑truth data collection and validation under data‑scarcity conditions.

Required skills

• AWS cloud services
• KoboToolbox data collection platform
• Machine learning model development and validation
• Version control and reproducible pipeline engineering