We are advancing practical, scalable solutions to help animals
Careers at Innovate Animal Ag
At Innovate Animal Ag, each day is a new challenge. One day we might talk to animal scientists and dig into literature to assess the welfare impact of a new technology. The next day we might talk to the media about a recent technological breakthrough. The next, we might prepare a pitch deck for an agricultural producer to invest in a new technology. You don’t have to have done all this before, but you have to be able to jump in if that’s what needs to be done.
Our core mission is to improve animal welfare through advancing cutting-edge technologies. As a nonprofit think-tank, we don’t directly develop technologies ourselves. Rather, we support technologies through ecosystem level work, trying to find ways to price in the positive externality of animal welfare. In practice, this work consists of:
Deeply researching new trends and technologies in animal agriculture through literature review, trade press, and speaking to producers.
Identifying new technologies that could have a large positive impact on animal welfare, then understanding their commercial status and bottlenecks to adoption.
Designing interventions to alleviate those bottlenecks and running small trials to assess if they could be impactful.
Scaling up the trials that seem to be working.
As a fairly young startup nonprofit, our program is constantly evolving. We have way more ideas than we have time to try. If you are excited about the idea of building this new organization from the ground up, please join us!
“I believe that animal welfare as a social and political cause is massively underperforming its potential because practical, scalable solutions are not yet at the center of discussion. We focus so much on telling people what they shouldn’t eat, and telling businesses what they shouldn’t do. The climate movement achieved success by centering technologies like renewable energy and electric vehicles, then mobilizing massive social and political capital towards their adoption. Animal welfare is structurally similar, ultimately being about mitigating negative externalities of industrialization. The broadest ambition of Innovate Animal Ag is to bring a techno-optimist revolution to animal welfare, advancing technological solutions to major challenges and seeking to reward innovative and disruptive companies that are doing things better.”
— Robert Yaman, CEO
Yes, We’re Hiring!
In 2025, our focus is going to be on exploration. We spent the first phase of our organization focused on bringing in-ovo sexing to the US, and as of December 2024, we succeeded. That was our MVP. Now, the question is how to scale our impact.
We’ll keep pushing on in-ovo sexing until it’s standard practice around the globe. But we now have the resources to think broader and more ambitiously. What other technologies can we push forward? What other kinds of interventions will help us build an agricultural system that’s in line with our values, but also with food abundance?
We don’t know the answers to these questions, but in 2025 we’re going to try to figure that out. And we know we need great people to do this. But paradoxically, we don’t know exactly what they’re going to be doing in 6 months.
Therefore, we’re trying out a different kind of hiring strategy. Instead of coming up with ideas of things to do, and then hiring people with experience doing them, we want to find amazing people, and then figure out ways to utilize them that push our mission forward.
If you’re someone with exceptional ability and agency, who feels like Innovate Animal ag is the organization you’ve always been searching for, we want to hear from you. Especially if you see an opportunity that we’re missing, if you can bring a perspective to the table that we lack, or if you’re the best in the world at whatever you do, we want to hear from you.
We pay above market, have great benefits, and are fully remote.
This isn’t an “open application” where you’ll send your resume into a black hole, never to be heard from again. We look at every application that comes in.
If you’re interested, please send a resume and a short personal essay to careers@innovateanimalag.org. In your personal essay, please focus on how you fit into the criteria above, and what your personal relationship is to our mission. Ideally, you should make it clear why you want to work at Innovate Animal Ag over all of the other great organizations out there doing similar things.