About You and the Role

We are seeking a Technical Program Manager to support Autonomy Data and Maps Operations for autonomous drone systems. As the Technical Program Manager for Autonomy Data and Maps Operations, you will own and scale how we produce autonomy data and maps so our drone systems can reliably operate in the real world. This role is responsible for turning messy, manual operational workflows into efficient, scalable, and high-quality systems by partnering closely with engineering. In practice, you’ll run the day-to-day map and data operations while also driving the tooling, automation, and process changes needed to support rapid growth.

This role sits at the intersection of machine learning data production, map curation, and platform enablement, and is responsible for translating real-world operational work into reliable, scalable inputs for autonomy development and deployment.

The TPM will own not only the day-to-day execution of autonomy data and map operations, but also the cross-functional engineering work required to scale those operations through better tooling, workflow redesign, and automation. This person will be expected to learn the current map creation and data production processes end-to-end, identify where they will break as we scale, and guide the engineering effort to define and implement how we should work in the future.

We value people who take ownership of outcomes, not just responsibilities; you’ll be identifying systemic bottlenecks early, driving clarity for complex decisions, and ensuring work gets completed even when challenges fall outside traditional role boundaries.

What You'll Do

Program Execution & Coordination

• Drive day-to-day execution of data and map curation programs used for ML development
• Own end-to-end map creation and delivery across planning, curation, validation, release readiness, and handoff to downstream users
• Coordinate across autonomy teams, engineering partners, and external vendors as needed
• Track progress, dependencies, risks, and timelines across multiple concurrent workstreams
• Drive clear operating procedures and decision-making across operations and engineering stakeholders
• Structure ambiguous work into executable plans and proactively manage delivery risk

Autonomy Data & Map Operations

• Learn and deeply understand current-state data and map production workflows, including where manual effort, quality escapes, and handoff friction exist
• Identify the process, tooling, and systems changes needed to scale map creation and data operations as demand grows and the business scales
• Translate operational pain points into clear engineering problem statements, requirements, and prioritized roadmaps
• Partner with Maps, Autonomy, and Data Platform engineering teams to drive implementation of automation, tooling, and workflow redesign
• Define future-state operating models for end-to-end map creation that improve throughput, quality, and predictability
• Ensure new tools and workflows are adopted successfully by operations teams and measurably improve performance

Cross-Functional & Platform Collaboration

• Act as the conduit between operations and engineering
• Translate operational pain points (manual work, bottlenecks, errors, scale limitations) into clear problem statements for tooling or feature development
• Have a sense for product and partner with Data Platform to shape requirements, prioritize work, and validate solutions
• Support rollout and adoption of new tools or workflows back into operations

Continuous Improvement

• Identify inefficiencies and failure patterns in data and map operations
• Propose process improvements, automation opportunities, and clearer ownership models
• Help standardize workflows while preserving flexibility for new sites, regions, or vehicle capabilities

What You’ll Bring

• Experience & Mindset:
• 2–4 years of experience in technical program management, data operations, program management, or similar roles
• Experience working with cross-functional technical teams (engineering, operations, ML data, or GIS)
• Strong organizational and communication skills, with the ability to manage multiple parallel workstreams
• Comfort working in ambiguous, fast-moving environments
• Ability to break down complex, loosely defined problems into actionable plans
• Experience leading operational transformation, process redesign, or automation efforts in partnership with engineering teams
• Ability to understand current-state workflows in depth and translate them into scalable future-state systems and operating models

• Technical & Program Skills:
  • Proven ability to manage complex cross-functional programs across scope, schedule, risks, dependencies, and milestones
  • Strong systems thinking, with the ability to quickly learn unfamiliar technical domains and understand tradeoffs
  • Experience translating operational workflows and pain points into engineering requirements, tooling needs, or product features
  • Familiarity with data operations concepts such as annotation workflows, QA/QC, data pipelines, validation, or storage
  • Proficiency with project/program management tools such as Jira, Smartsheet, MS Project, Asana, or similar
  • Ability to define and improve operational metrics such as throughput, quality, reliability, latency, or delivery predictability

• Communication:
  
  • Exceptional written and verbal communication across technical and non-technical stakeholders
  • Strong facilitation skills, with the ability to guide discussions, clarify decisions, and align diverse teams
  • Ability to influence without authority and drive change across operations and engineering teams
  • Adaptable and resilient when introducing new processes, tools, or operating models

Nice to Have

• Background in autonomous systems, robotics, drones, or AVs
• Experience with GIS, mapping platforms, or spatial data
• Exposure to data platform concepts (pipelines, ingestion, storage, validation)
• Experience working with vendors or distributed operations teams
• Experience with SQL or data analytics

What Else You Need To Know

Zipline is an equal opportunity employer and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, ancestry, national origin, religion or religious creed, mental or physical disability, medical condition, genetic information, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, and related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, marital status, military or veteran status, citizenship, or other characteristics protected by state, federal or local law or our other policies.

We value diversity at Zipline and welcome applications from those who are traditionally underrepresented in tech. If you like the sound of this position but are not sure if you are the perfect fit, please apply!

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Please Note

We have received reports stating that certain individuals are reaching out to people under false pretenses, claiming to be Zipline employees, affiliates, agents, or representatives. They may seek to gain access to your personal information or to acquire money from you by offering fictitious employment opportunities or by claiming that they are contacting you on Zipline’s behalf.

Genuine Zipline employees or representatives will never ask you for money or payment in exchange for employment opportunities or other related services. Any such offer of employment or any other service in exchange for fees that claims to be from us is deceitful and part of a fraud.

If you believe you have been targeted by a fraudulent party, we ask that you immediately get in touch with us via email at security@flyzipline.com upon receiving a suspicious offer or claim.

About One Acre Fund

Founded in 2006, One Acre Fund equips 5.5 million smallholder farmers to make their farms more productive. Across nine countries that together are home to two-thirds of Africa's farmers, we provide high-quality farm supplies, tree seedlings, accessible credit, modern agronomic training, and a wide range of other agricultural services. On average, this model enables any farmer to increase their income and assets on supported land by more than 35 percent, while permanently improving their resilience. This is all made possible by our team of 9,000+ full-time staff, drawn from diverse backgrounds and professions. To learn more, please see our Why Work Here blog post.

Our Rwanda program, founded in 2007 is our largest and operates under the local brand Tubura. We have more than 3,000 staff across all four provinces of Rwanda, as well as in Kigali. Together, we served more than 2.8 million farmers in 2024. We work closely with the government to support national efforts to improve food security. Additionally, we help channel funding and resources to promising agri-SMEs, supporting farmers by providing a market for high-impact crops such as coffee, avocado, and chili.

About the Role

Lead the RICA Seed Center’s science and training services. We seek an expert to manage technical research and professional courses, ensuring absolute integrity and excellence to help 1M+ farmers access high-quality seed in Rwanda. This role will have a 40% research, 40% postgraduate-level teaching, and 20% management requirement.

Responsibilities

Lead Department Strategy, Team & Operational Excellence

• Define and drive the Seed Center’s Scientific/Technology strategic roadmap, ensuring alignment with long-term industry impartiality and impact goals.
• Lead and develop a high-performing, multidisciplinary team, fostering accountability, collaboration, and continuous learning.
• Oversee departmental planning, budgeting, and OKRs, ensuring strong execution and operational efficiency.

Direct Seed Technology & Business Professional Training Program 

• Lead the end-to-end delivery of a flagship postgraduate training program, ensuring strong student outcomes, curriculum relevance, and industry reputation - including leading the applied research units of the course.
• Drive accreditation, regional positioning, and growth of the program, including partnerships and funding opportunities.
• Coordinate instructors and partners to deliver high-quality technical and leadership training - in partnership with the academic administration and trainee welfare coordinator.

Provide Strategic Leadership for Seed Laboratory & Certification Services

• Oversee the long-term technical roadmap for seed laboratory services, including quality testing, certification, and accreditation (e.g. ISO, ISTA).
• Ensure delivery of high-quality, impartial laboratory services that meet national and international standards.
• Build and manage strategic partnerships with regulatory bodies and industry stakeholders.

Lead National Field Trials & Seed Systems Strengthening

• Oversee national performance trials, ensuring high-quality data generation (e.g. DUS, VCU) and compliance with international standards.
• Coordinate publication of national variety lists and support transparent, credible seed system governance.
• Strengthen collaboration with government and private sector partners to advance Rwanda’s seed industry.

Drive Technical Insight, Reporting & Sector Influence

• Ensure production of high-quality, user-focused technical reports and validated data for stakeholders.
• Analyze seed sector trends and generate insights to inform strategy, policy, and industry development.
• Act as a senior technical voice, contributing to national dialogue and shaping the future of the seed sector.

Career Growth and Development

We have a strong culture of constant learning and we invest in developing our people. You’ll have weekly check-ins with your manager, access to mentorship and training programs, and regular feedback on your performance. We hold career reviews every six months, and set aside time to discuss your aspirations and career goals. You’ll have the opportunity to shape a growing organization and build a rewarding long-term career.

Qualifications

Across all roles, these are the general qualifications we look for. For this role specifically, you will have:

• PhD in Plant Breeding, Seed Science, Seed Systems, Seed Technology, or related field (or MSc. with significant relevant experience).
• 5+ years (MSc) or 2+ years (PhD) of relevant experience in seed research, development, or systems.
• Excellent in scientific and technical writing and reporting skills; publication experience is an advantage - with an ability to perform and interpret complex statistics being a big plus.
• Advanced expertise in seed science, plant breeding, or seed systems, with strong knowledge of seed technologies and grain crops.
• Familiarity with international regulatory frameworks (e.g. UPOV, ISTA, OECD) and seed certification systems.
• Ability to operate in high-context environments, driving alignment, accountability, and results.
• Experience delivering training, academic programs, or professional capacity-building initiatives.
• English required; working proficiency in Kinyarwanda is an advantage.

Preferred Start Date

As soon as possible

Job Location

Kigali, Rwanda

Benefits

Health insurance, housing, and comprehensive benefits

Eligibility

One Acre Fund can support a work permit for this role. However, nationals of (or those with an extensive professional background and work history in) our countries of operation are preferred.

Application Deadline

21 July 2026. Please note that we hire on a rolling basis which means that applications are reviewed and processed on a continuous basis until a hire is made.

One Acre Fund never asks candidates to pay any money or pay for tests at any stage of the interview process. Official One Acre Fund emails will always arrive from an @oneacrefund.org address. Please report any suspicious communication here (globalhotline@oneacrefund.org), but do not send applications or application materials to this email address.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI), and anti-racism are deeply connected to our organization’s mission and purpose. One Acre Fund aspires to build a culture where all staff feel consistently valued, represented, and connected – so that our team can thrive as professionals, and achieve exceptional impact for the farmers we serve.

We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, gender, gender identity or expression. We are proud to be an equal opportunity workplace.

About One Acre Fund

Founded in 2006, One Acre Fund equips 5.5 million smallholder farmers to make their farms more productive. Across nine countries that together are home to two-thirds of Africa's farmers, we provide high-quality farm supplies, tree seedlings, accessible credit, modern agronomic training, and a wide range of other agricultural services. On average, this model enables any farmer to increase their income and assets on supported land by more than 35 percent, while permanently improving their resilience. This is all made possible by our team of 9,000+ full-time staff, drawn from diverse backgrounds and professions. To learn more, please see our Why Work Here blog post.

About the Role

From R&D to sales to strategy to operations, the Global R&D Data Analyst has the unique opportunity to improve decision-making across all aspects of One Acre Fund’s program using many diverse data types, such as sales, yield, demographic and satellite data, to help us reach more farmers with greater impact. 

The Global R&D Data Analyst will help us reach over one million farmers by executing analyses for strategic decision-making on repayment, expansion, and other business functions, and work directly with program leaders to interpret results and make data-driven decisions. The Global R&D Data Analyst will play an integral role in shaping One Acre Fund’s data strategy, including dreaming up and executing new ways to use our data to improve our program.

Additionally, One Acre Fund has a robust agronomic and socioeconomic research program spanning all countries of operation. This role will work closely with country R&D teams to ensure all trials are executed at the highest possible standards, provide follow-up analytical support and training to team members, and support with warehousing of our agronomic data to make our research outputs accessible to external collaborators, further increasing One Acre Fund’s smallholder farmer impact across the continent.

To succeed in this role, you will need to be a strong communicator and have a solid analytical background with experience in experimental design. You will need to be comfortable interpreting ambiguous results generated with imperfect data and advising leaders on the relative risk associated with different decisions based on the results of your analysis. 

This is a deliberately hybrid role. Success requires the ability to operate effectively as:

• an experimental methodologist (trial design & causal inference),
• an applied data scientist (production analytics, geospatial methods, modelling), and
• a delivery-oriented project manager (prioritisation, documentation, coordination).

Responsibilities

Own methodological rigour and analytical quality for trials and surveys (30%):

• Design and analyse trials and surveys, including:
  • Sample size and power calculations
  • Stratification and experimental design
  • Recommend the appropriate statistical methods (e.g., hypothesis testing, regression, ANOVA/mixed models)
• Lead analysis of agronomic and product trials to estimate treatment effects and program impact
• Quality assure trial designs and analyses produced by other analysts
• Translate trial findings into clear recommendations for product design, agronomic guidance, and program strategy.

Develop scalable analytical products and decision-support tools using program, survey, and spatial data (30%):

• Build, maintain, and improve analytical pipelines and production codebases that power operational decision tools (e.g., sowing date or input recommendations), including occasional support at the production level.
• Integrate survey, MEL, and operational data with geospatial layers (soil, climate, vegetation, remote sensing) to generate localised recommendations and program targeting strategies.
• Conduct spatial and remote-sensing analyses for program design, prioritisation, and impact estimation (e.g., soil erosion modelling, site suitability analysis).
• Analyse historical trial and soil data to generate input and soil management recommendations (e.g., lime application, fertiliser rate application).
• Evaluate potential impact of alternative interventions and support pilot design, iteration, and scale decisions.
• Translate analyses into decision-ready outputs (briefs, dashboards, and memos) for non-technical stakeholders.
• Identify new, high-leverage analytical use cases that improve program reach, impact, or cost-effectiveness.

Lead impact data management and project management (~20%)

• Lead curation and standardisation of historical yield, agronomic practice, and trial datasets to enable reuse and external research collaboration.
• Own knowledge management for impact data and trials, including:
  • Central documentation of methodologies, assumptions, sample sizes, and results for all projects
  • Reusable analysis templates and reference implementations
• Manage external data requests in compliance with client data protection and confidentiality protocols.

Provide portfolio-level project management (~20%):

• Maintain project plans, priorities, and timelines
• Track dependencies and risks
• Coordinate with program and R&D stakeholders to identify potential delivery risks
• Establish durable documentation and planning systems (e.g., project roadmaps, project trackers, shared repositories).

Career Growth and Development

We have a strong culture of constant learning, and we invest in developing our people. You’ll have weekly check-ins with your manager, access to mentorship and training programs, and regular feedback on your performance. We hold career reviews every six months and set aside time to discuss your aspirations and career goals. You’ll have the opportunity to shape a growing organization and build a rewarding long-term career.

Qualifications

Across all roles, these are the general qualifications we look for. For this role specifically, you will have:

• Bachelor's Degree in one of the following fields: economics, econometrics, mathematics, or statistics
• Proficiency in R and/or Python, including working knowledge of -
• Database connectivity (e.g., PostgreSQL) to enable data retrieval, manipulation, and storage from various databases
• Interact with RESTful APIs (e.g., JSON, XML)
• Data manipulation libraries (e.g., dplyr, tidyr) for efficient data wrangling, transformation, and exploration
• Packages for data visualisation (e.g., ggplot2, lattice, plotly)
• Advanced statistical analysis and modelling (stats, lme4, survival)
• Machine learning frameworks (e.g., randomForest, xgboost, caret) for building predictive models and conducting machine learning tasks
• Packages for data manipulation and visualisation, such as numpy, pandas, and Matplotlib
• Spatial data manipulation libraries (geopandas, rasterio, shapely, GDAL)
• In-depth knowledge of statistically rigorous trial design methodologies, including RCTs, side-by-side comparisons, RCBD, and other experimental designs
• In-depth knowledge of statistically rigorous survey design methods, including random, stratified, and cluster sampling
• Knowledge of relevant meteorological, soil, and vegetation data layers and sources, their uses and limitations (e.g., iSDA, ISRIC, CHIRPS, TAMSAT, NASA, Sentinel Hub, Google Earth Engine, AWS)
• Working knowledge of agronomy, e.g., practical understanding of fertiliser nutrient compositions, plant populations, growing degree days, GxE interactions.
• Working knowledge of GIS tools such as ArcGIS and QGIS, and spatial data analysis techniques.
• Proficiency in version control, such as Git/GitHub.
• Ability to easily explain technical concepts to non-technical decision makers and grow the analytical skills of others.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills for coordinating across teams.
• Demonstrated ability to manage multiple analytical projects in parallel, including:
• Scoping ambiguous analytical problems and translating them into deliverable plans
• Prioritising work against timelines and stakeholder needs
• Tracking progress, managing dependencies, and proactively unblocking delivery risks
• Maintaining clear documentation and project plans to ensure continuity and institutional memory

Preferred Start Date

As soon as possible

Job Location

Nairobi, Kenya or Kigali, Rwanda

Benefits

Health insurance, housing, and comprehensive benefits

Contract Duration

2 Years

Eligibility

One Acre Fund can support a work permit for this role. However, nationals of (or those with an extensive professional background and work history in) our countries of operation are preferred.

Application Deadline

10 July, 2026

Please note that we hire on a rolling basis, which means that applications are reviewed and processed on a continuous basis until a hire is made.

One Acre Fund never asks candidates to pay any money or pay for tests at any stage of the interview process. Official One Acre Fund emails will always arrive from an @oneacrefund.org address. Please report any suspicious communication here (globalhotline@oneacrefund.org), but do not send applications or application materials to this email address.

Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (DEI), and anti-racism are deeply connected to our organisation’s mission and purpose. One Acre Fund aspires to build a culture where all staff feel consistently valued, represented, and connected – so that our team can thrive as professionals, and achieve exceptional impact for the farmers we serve.

We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, colour, ancestry, religion, sex, national origin, sexual orientation, age, marital status, disability, gender, gender identity or expression. We are proud to be an equal opportunity workplace.