Machine Learning Engineer

About Apollo Agriculture: Apollo Agriculture is a leading agri-fintech platform empowering small-scale farmers across Africa to increase their profits and farm more sustainably. Apollo uses artificial intelligence and automated operations to unlock the massive, untapped small-scale farming market. Apollo enables farmers to access the optimized financing, high-quality farm products, expert digital advice, and risk management solutions they need to invest and scale their businesses. Apollo grew paying customers over 2.5x in 2023 to over 200K small-scale farmers in Kenya and Zambia, increasing revenue to nearly $30M with robust unit economics. Apollo partners with key global agriculture companies like Bayer, OCP and Yara, and is backed by Anthemis, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, Flourish Ventures, Leaps by Bayer, and Softbank Vision Fund. Apollo’s team brings together technology, credit and operations experience from The Climate Corporation, Google, Capital One, Revolut, and One Acre Fund.
About the Role: Apollo is seeking an exceptional Machine Learning Engineer to join our Tech team and help us develop predictive Machine Learning models that power our credit decisioning, fraud prevention and farming advisory capabilities.
In this role, you will have the opportunity to combine different data sources like survey data, satellite imagery, weather forecasts and more to improve the capabilities and accuracy of our machine learning models to enhance our different business processes and improve the experience of our customers through different parts of their journey. You will work across different parts of our business and in collaboration with our Product & Engineering and Credit teams to achieve these goals.
This is a hands-on role which requires deep knowledge of developing models in Python, deploying and operating them in production. 
Reporting Lines: This role reports to the Engineering Manager.

Responsibilities:

• Build Machine Learning models to improve key areas of our product and customer lifecycle.
• Design, develop and deploy systems at scale to handle our growing demand.
• Maintain and evolve our cloud-based ML Platform, which we use for feature engineering, model development and model training in production.
• Propose and evaluate potential usage of ML model across Apollo.
• Mentor other engineers and peers across the organization on how to apply machine learning to improve our product.
• Collaborate with our engineering, product and credit teams to evolve our credit & fraud decision and advisory capabilities.

You:

• Are excited about the mission of transforming the livelihoods of smallholder farmers.
• Are a creative problem solver and excited to solve problems where technology doesn’t work as usual. Imagine challenges like poor or non-existent cell phone coverage, limited quality mobile phone hardware and limited demographic and weather datasets, and so on.
• Have experience as a ML Engineer, Data Scientist or similar role, developing and maintaining ML Platforms and Model Pipelines. This includes understanding best practices on how to establish a model baseline, address concept drift, and how to develop, deploy, and continuously monitor/improve a productionized machine learning application. This typically means you have 3+ years of experience in such a role.
• Have experience writing software at scale in any programming language such as Python, Java, Golang or Scala. This typically means you have 5+ years of professional software development experience at a fast growing technology company.
• Have Knowledge of cloud computing fundamentals, including 1+ years working on AWS cloud-based infrastructure and experience with technologies such as ECS and Sagemaker to to build, train, and deploy ML models at scale
• Are an exceptional writer and communicator. You can turn technical challenges and solutions into digestible technical documents and proposals to seek alignment and enable efficient technical decision making
• Are a tireless problem solver who can roll up your sleeves to tackle whatever challenges need urgent attention, no matter when they arise. You have a “whatever it takes” attitude and are comfortable managing peers across different teams to get the job done.

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 and challenging projects. 
• Value autonomy, honesty, transparency, and respect. 
• Are excited to hear from you!

At Apollo Agriculture, we are building an inclusive and supportive work environment where every individual has the opportunity to thrive. We encourage female candidates to apply to this position