Senior Engineering Manager

About Digital Green :

Digital Green is a global non-profit that has spent nearly two decades helping smallholder farmers build more prosperous, resilient livelihoods - reaching over 10 million farmers to date.

Our flagship product, FarmerChat, is a multilingual AI-powered advisory platform that gives farmers timely, locally relevant guidance - from climate-resilient practices to pest management, input use, and market access - in the language and format that works for them.

Today FarmerChat reaches farmers across India, Kenya, Ethiopia, Nigeria, and Brazil, with millions of questions asked and answered in over 15 local languages.

We combine deep, on-the-ground agricultural extension experience with modern AI to meet farmers where they are, and help them make better decisions, faster.

Job Summary :

We are hiring a Senior Engineering Manager to lead the design, development, and delivery of Digital Green's technology platforms - backend systems, web applications, mobile apps, and quality engineering - that power FarmerChat's AI-driven, multimodal agricultural advisory experience.

This is a senior leadership role responsible for engineering execution, technical direction, and team development across multiple functions, while ensuring the platform scales reliably and cost-effectively to serve millions of farmers across diverse, often low-connectivity markets.

You will work closely with AI/ML, Product, Design, MEL, Data, and external partner teams to deliver integrated solutions that leverage LLMs, data pipelines, analytics systems, SDK integrations, and multimodal interfaces, while driving process improvements using an AI-first approach across engineering workflows.

Key Responsibilities :

Technical Leadership & System Design :

- Set technical direction and guide architecture for scalable, distributed systems across the stack.

- Ensure alignment with AI-driven use cases, data pipelines, analytics workflows, and SDK integrations.

- Provide senior technical direction for integrating LLMs and AI systems, external SDKs and third-party tools, and data/analytics platforms.

- Ensure the maintainability, performance, and long-term evolution of existing and legacy systems.

- Make and own build-vs-buy and architectural trade-off decisions at an organizational level.

Process Improvement & AI-First Engineering Practices :

- Drive engineering process improvements using an AI-first approach, including development workflows (Jira, Git, code reviews), CI/CD pipelines, and release processes.

- Champion the adoption of AI-assisted tools for development, testing, and debugging across the org.

- Reduce cycle time and bottlenecks; increase automation and developer productivity org-wide.

Cross-Functional & External Collaboration :

- Partner closely with Product to define requirements and prioritize roadmap.

- Partner with AI/ML teams to integrate and scale AI systems in production.

- Partner with MEL and Data teams to support analytics, impact measurement, and reporting.

- Partner with Design to ensure high-quality, accessible user experience.

- Interface with external partners and vendors on SDK integrations, platform/tool integrations, and technical coordination.

- Represent engineering in senior/leadership forums, ensuring alignment between technical solutions, product goals, and real-world program needs.

Engineering Delivery, Execution & Resource Optimization :

- Own end-to-end delivery of engineering initiatives across backend, frontend, mobile, and QA.

- Ensure timely, high-quality delivery aligned with product and organizational goals.

- Plan and optimize team capacity, resource allocation, and workload distribution across multiple pods or workstreams.

- Drive efficient utilization of engineering resources to maximize output and impact.

- Ensure systems are built and operated with cost efficiency in mind (infrastructure, APIs, tooling).

- Define and track product and engineering metrics (performance, usage, reliability) to support data-driven decision-making.

Team Leadership & Capacity Building :

- Manage, mentor, and grow a team of backend, frontend, mobile, and QA engineers, including engineering leads/managers where applicable.

- Ensure clear task allocation, prioritization, and accountability across teams.

- Build a culture of ownership, collaboration, quality, and continuous improvement.

- Own hiring, performance management, and career development for the engineering organization.

Quality, Scale & Operational Excellence :

- Ensure systems are deployed and maintained with high reliability and performance at scale.

- Own testing strategy, release quality, and system monitoring across the platform.

- Ensure readiness for large-scale deployments across diverse, often low-connectivity environments.

- Drive continuous improvement in system observability, logging, and incident response.

Required Qualifications & Skills :

- 10+ years of software engineering experience, with 4+ years in engineering management, including managing managers or multiple engineering functions.

- Bachelor's/Master's in Computer Science or equivalent.

- Proven experience leading teams that design, build, and operate scalable production systems.

- Strong understanding of backend technologies like Python, Django, Java etc., frontend, and mobile systems (android app development, iOS app development), and how they integrate.

- Experience with system design and distributed systems at scale.

- Familiarity with data pipelines, analytics systems, and AI integrations (LLMs, APIs).

- Experience integrating external SDKs and third-party platforms.

- Strong grasp of CI/CD, version control (Git), and modern engineering workflows.

- Ability to balance technical decisions against cost, performance, scalability, and product impact.

- Strong debugging and problem-solving ability for complex, system-level issues.

- Strong experience with Agile/Scrum methodologies and driving cross-team coordination and execution.

- Strong leadership and organizational team-management skills, with experience developing other managers or senior engineers.

- High level of ownership and accountability; comfortable operating in ambiguous, real-world environments.

- Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, both internal and external.

You'll stand out if you have :

- Experience building or scaling engineering teams at a mission-driven organization or in emerging markets.

- Experience with systems supporting model evaluation, feedback loops, or product/impact metrics.

- Exposure to low-connectivity, multilingual, or low-literacy user contexts.

- Experience partnering directly with MEL/impact measurement functions.

What You'll Build :

- A scalable, reliable engineering organization and technical roadmap supporting FarmerChat's growth across new markets and languages.

- Robust integrations between LLM/AI systems, data pipelines, and the core product platform.

- Engineering processes and AI-first workflows that measurably improve delivery speed and quality org-wide.

- A strong bench of engineering leads and managers through mentorship and structured career development.

Skills

System Design, Python, Django, Java, Git, Engineering Management