We’re building the DARPA of animal agriculture
Careers at Innovate Animal Ag
Our mission is to leverage technology to build an agriculture system that’s humane, sustainable, and also compatible with the food abundance that industrialization has made possible. We are bringing together the pioneers, ideas, and resources to make this new system a reality.
But when it comes to accelerating technological innovation, there’s no one-size-fits all approach. Each technology brings its own mix of biological, economic, regulatory, and operational challenges, so interventions must be tailor-made. Sometimes it’s new research to answer a crucial question; sometimes it’s spinning out a company; sometimes it’s securing financing to de-risk scale-up.
Our team, culture, and organizational structure are built around this unique set of challenges. We are strongly influenced by DARPA, the US defence innovation program, where each program area (like GPS or self-driving cars) is owned by a dedicated leader with deep expertise, individual accountability, and strategic autonomy. We apply the same model to animal health and welfare technologies: identify high-potential projects, run disciplined experiments, and move resources quickly from what isn’t working to what is.
Therefore, instead of coming up with ideas of things to do and then hiring people with experience doing them, we look for exceptional people who can rise to whatever new challenge they may face. If you’re an entrepreneurial generalist who learns fast, reasons from first principles, and executes without hand-holding, you’ll do well here. We value people who deeply engage deeply with how innovation actually moves the real world, who are comfortable making decisions under uncertainty, and failing fast.
Within Innovate Animal Ag, there’s no typical day. One day, you might conduct a deep literature review to understand the biology of a particular welfare challenge. The next day you might negotiate the details of a partnership with a large corporation. The next day, you might create a financial model to decide whether an academic research proposal is worth funding. 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.
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.
“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
Open Roles
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The poultry industry has always struggled to get high-quality commercial data, and nothing is harder to measure than welfare. Most of what we think we know about welfare technology rests on small university studies that don't look like commercial production and take years to run. The data that actually matters has simply been too hard to capture at scale. But that’s changing: new AI tools around continuous sensing, machine vision, and robotics are giving us the ability to measure welfare at the level of the individual bird, and to run rigorous experiments against those measurements. Your job is to build a new, AI-native technology stack for observing and understanding animal welfare under real production conditions.
This is a full-time exempt remote position, requiring travel within the United States.
Responsibilities:
Own the technology strategy: the AI-native monitoring and data infrastructure (cameras, sensors, bird-level tracking, environmental telemetry) that is the backbone for every trial we run.
Make build/buy/partner decisions across the tech stack — including for hardware that can survive real barn conditions — and integrate components into one coherent, reusable system rather than a pile of point solutions.
Work with the Program Team to build the pipeline of external technologies we test (robotics, computer vision, vaccines, feed additives, etc.). — assess readiness, design the integration, and render clear go/no-go judgments.
Build the data platform and standards so results are clean, comparable, and reusable across trials.
Build the technical team. Make the first engineering and data hires, decide what we hold in-house versus contract or partner for, and convene the outside expertise we don't have.
Understand and interface with the systems already in a working barn (control units, feed lines, ventilation) and lead the technical side of infrastructure upgrades.
Own our IP strategy on the technology side: identify genuinely novel inventions and file patents opportunistically, and manage licensing and ownership terms with technology partners.
About You
A technical generalist. Broad working knowledge across AI/ML, computer vision, sensing, data infrastructure, and hardware, rather than deep specialization in one. You're comfortable being the person who understands how the whole system fits together, and you know how and when to bring in a specialist.
You use AI to put structure on messy things. The core of this job is taking something complicated and poorly measured (a barn full of animals) and turning it into clean, quantitative, decision-grade data.
A 0-to-1 builder. You've developed a technical roadmap and built a working system from nothing.
AI-native. You design from the assumption that AI and data are the foundation, not an add-on. You keep up with the latest developments in AI and physical AI. You can look at the current generation of precision livestock farming tools and see how to do better.
Physical-world experience is a plus. Ideally you've built systems that were commercially deployed in physical, uncontrolled environments like farms, factories, or field hardware.
A team builder. You've hired and led small technical teams, and you know how to keep the bar high.
A fast learner of new domains, who wants to be on the farm. You don't need a poultry background, but you do need to get up to speed on broiler production and welfare quickly, and earn the trust of people who've spent their careers in it.
Mission-aligned. You care about animal welfare and want to spend your effort improving it — drawn to an evidence-first, industry-facing approach.
A translator. You can talk to a barn manager, a machine-learning engineer, a startup founder, and a philanthropic funder in the same week — and convene people who don't normally talk to each other.
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In this role, you'll own a major piece of IAA's core program—identifying promising technologies, understanding what's standing in the way of their development and adoption, and then building the relationships and executing the interventions needed to move them forward. Think of it as a DARPA program director model applied to animal welfare: you'll have significant autonomy to shape your portfolio, place bets on promising technologies, and drive them toward real-world impact.
About the role
Full-time
US applicants only
Remote
Base salary $95-$150K based on experience and location.
Key responsibilities
Build and maintain relationships with key players in your focus area—researchers, companies, investors, industry groups, and other stakeholders—to stay close to the frontier and identify opportunities for impact.
Conduct deep research into a key animal health or welfare technology area, identifying gaps, bottlenecks, and opportunities. Leverage AI tools to accelerate and deepen this work.
Develop and execute interventions to fill gaps or accelerate progress—such as research grants, competitions, investments, market shaping initiatives, or other approaches you identify as high-impact.
Directly support grantees and partners, helping them collaborate and progress toward key technological milestones.
Identify and cultivate new partnerships, funding opportunities, and industry collaborations that can amplify IAA's programmatic work.
About you
You are deeply aligned with our mission to improve animal health and welfare through technology.
You understand and buy into our unique theory of change, and are excited by the opportunity to push it forward.
You are a creative problem solver.
You can quickly and critically absorb new information about a novel field.
You have a track record of stellar achievement in any field, especially with a research or entrepreneurial focus.
You are excited to work in an early-stage startup nonprofit environment. This means:
You have an entrepreneurial drive, are ambitious and anti-complacent.
You’re comfortable navigating ambiguity and creating structure from scratch.
You’re eager to jump into whatever task is needed—even if it’s tedious, unglamorous, or outside your job description.
You are comfortable with repeatedly failing, learning, and adjusting (then failing again).
Innovate Animal Ag is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all applicants and employees regardless of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law. We encourage candidates from all backgrounds to apply—if you're excited about this role but aren't sure you meet every qualification, we'd still love to hear from you.