Full Stack Developer - Sustainable Agriculture Software

Full-stack Developers

• Sustainable Agriculture SaaS start-up
• Hybrid (able to travel to our shared office in London regularly)
• £4-7.5k per month (depending on experience) + equity options
• Flexible working hours, support for professional development, working directly with our co-founders in a fun, fast-paced environment.

Are you a developer wanting to apply your skills in way that has a positive impact on the planet?

At Soil Benchmark we’re on a mission to restore the health of soils around the world via our Digital Soil Management platform. We’re a fast-growing start-up and need more awesome developers like you! Join us to help shape a future where healthy soils support profitable farms delivering nutritious food, clean rivers, thriving wildlife, and carbon removal.

Do you want to make a real difference to one of the biggest challenges of our time? (And how can you answer ‘no’ to that one?)

Unsustainable agricultural practices are degrading our soils. This is awful news for both farm businesses and for the environment. When soils are degraded, the farms no longer reap the benefits of natural soil functions in supporting the profitability of their businesses. At the same time those soils no longer function properly in their roles of cleaning water, storing carbon and promoting biodiversity.

If you’re our ideal candidate, you'll care about how humanity is impacting our planet, and you might already be aware that the health of global soils is at crisis point. Soil Benchmark helps solve this crisis. Our independent, data-driven, software assists Farm Advisors (currently in the UK but you will help us expand elsewhere) in defining and implementing sustainable soil management practices.

Our software utilises the wealth of existing environmental datasets and on-farm records to ensure that sustainable soil management is intuitively defined and easily communicated. We are growing really quickly (>170,000ha since we launched out of beta in November 2023). This growth means that we are looking for a couple of developers to join the team and use their skills and enthusiasm to make some tangible impact.

OK nice idea. But why should I quit my nice cushy job to work at a start-up?

We’re a start-up but we’ve shown we are onto something. We were initially backed by grant funding from DEFRA, Ordnance Survey, the European Space Agency and the University of Edinburgh. Off the back of that and pre-seed funding we’ve built a great product that is now generating recurring revenues from farms across the country. But we want to accelerate our growth even further, and to do that we need more developers like you!

So, yes, we’re early-stage and you’d have to be ready to roll your sleeves up and get stuck in, but we also think we’ve shown we’re going places. We’d love you to come on board and help make sure we achieve our ambitious mission.

Great, I’m sold. How can I get involved?

We have a clearly defined plan of what we need to build (both new product development and also the optimisation of our sales funnel to drive growth). We are looking for a couple of developers to come on board and play a key role in delivering this plan. You’d be working closely with Ben (our co-founder and CSO), as well as our other developers (Henry, Anastasiia, and Richard) and directly with our customers (farm advisors and farmers) to build useful, intuitive software that they really want to use!

What we’re after:

• Green: you want to make a tangible difference to improving the environment and helping lighten our impact on the planet – (please, please don’t apply if you aren’t passionate about this, it’s by far the most important qualification).
• Team player: we're building a tribe, not just a team! Think stupid gifs on slack. Away days. Attending inspiring conferences/events. That sort of thing. We want someone who’s willing to get stuck in with us.
• Love learning: we really don’t mind if you don’t have experience in exactly what we do or our full tech-stack. As long as you like learning and pick things up you’ll be brilliant!
• Problem solver: we exist to solve problems for our amazing customers. They are fantastic at giving us lots of feedback, and hopefully you’d enjoy the chance to help come up with neat ways to sort things out for them. And then get more feedback... We’re looking for someone who wants to work with short feedback cycles like this.

What will I actually be doing day-to-day?

• Building our software based on the features that our users have already asked us to add to our platform. In the short term this would focus on adding features to our Soil, Manure and Nutrient Management Plans.
• Using your experience in software development to read between the lines of feedback and identify the problems that users are facing – and then come up with and build novel features that solve those problems. Even if users aren’t telling us explicitly what the problem is - e.g. making a feature more intuitive if you see on a live demo that users aren’t quickly working out how it should be used.
• Refining how we sell the platform and also building out our internal dashboards to work out which bits of the customer journey we should focus on improving.
• Working with and deriving national scale geospatial datasets
• Speaking with our customers (farm advisors and farmers) to get their feedback (this could be watching them use the product live on a call which we do frequently, or just them getting in touch with feedback). Then working with them and the team to define new features and products.

Our tech stack:

Here’s our current tech stack to whet your appetite (but to re-iterate what we said earlier, we really don’t mind if you don’t have experience in the full stack below, as long as you like learning and picking up new things up):

• Programming Languages: R, Python, Javascript, CSS, SQL, PL/pgSQL, HTML
• Frameworks: Shiny, Leaflet
• Database: PostgreSQL, PostGIS
• Tools: Git, Docker
• Google Cloud Platform: Cloud Run, Cloud Build, Cloud SQL

We think this is a unique opportunity to join a rapidly scaling start-up and make a tangible contribution to our mission.

Of course, the package will include salary (£4-7.5k per month depending on experience) and generous equity options so that you share in our success. We also know that working towards our mission needs to fit into both your life and your career:

• We are open to in-office or remote working options. We have a shared office space in Farringdon, London. It would be ideal if you are able to get to London fairly easily as we try to meet up as a team at least every few weeks in person. But if you want to be in the office every day, or work mainly from home, either is fine with us!
• We know that there are other things in life than work, so we have flexible working hours. Work when suits you (within reason) and take holiday when you need to. We are all committed to our mission and trust each other to work hard to achieve our ambitious goals.
• We are also really proud to support professional development for all our team. We want Soil Benchmark to be a driver not just of soil health on our customers' farms, but of the careers of all our team.
• And finally, a job should be fun! You spend too much of your life doing it to not enjoy yourself. So while we do work hard to build tools that our customers are asking for, we don't take ourselves too seriously. You will be working alongside our co-founders in a fun, fast-paced environment.

Ready to join our mission and be part of a dynamic team that's making a real difference? If you are a passionate developer with a drive to create positive environmental impact, we'd love to hear from you!

Apply now and join us in this rewarding journey to restore the health of our soils and contribute to a sustainable future!