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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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).
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The CTO owns the technology stack of Frontier Husbandry. The farm's core asset is data — a permanent, instrumented commercial operation that generates commercial-grade evidence faster and cheaper than anyone else in the industry. You'll build the AI-native monitoring and data infrastructure that makes that possible, and you'll run the pipeline that evaluates, integrates, and matures the technologies we test.
The job is not to build every sensor and model from scratch; it's to make smart build-vs-buy-vs-partner calls, integrate best-in-class components into a coherent system, and get us to a data foundation we can trust. The stack spans AI, machine vision, sensing, hardware, biology and data infrastructure — nobody is expert in all of it, so much of this job is knowing precisely where your own expertise ends and pulling in the right people at that boundary.
This is a full-time exempt remote position. However, the CTO must have the capability to travel to the location of the farm (location TBD) as much as is necessary.
Responsibilities:
Own the farm's 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 hardened hardware that survives 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 and set the bar for them, decide what we hold in-house versus contract or partner for, and convene the outside expertise we don't have — veterinary and welfare scientists, statisticians, specialist engineers.
Understand and interface with the systems already in a working barn (control units, feed lines, ventilation) and lead the technical side of infrastructure upgrades.
Partner closely with the Program Team and the Operations Lead so the data infrastructure actually answers the biological and welfare questions that matter, and with integrators and technology partners to keep the platform credible.
Own our IP strategy on the technology side: identify genuinely novel inventions that come out of the farm and file patents opportunistically, and manage licensing and ownership terms with technology partners.
About You
Stellar technical leadership. A track record of building real systems that work in the physical world — AI/ML, computer vision, sensor/IoT platforms, robotics, or data infrastructure — including hardware deployed in harsh or uncontrolled environments.
Calibrated across a wide stack. You have genuine depth in at least one core area, and you accurately know where that depth ends. At the boundary your instinct is to go find the right expert rather than improvise — and you can write a spec sharp enough to tell when the specialist you brought in is wrong.
AI-native. You design from the assumption that AI and data are the foundation, not an add-on. You keep up to date with the latest AI and physical AI developments.
A team builder. You've hired and led small technical teams, and you know the first few hires set the ceiling for everyone after them.
Commercial, not just academic. You've shipped technology in a commercial setting and you know the difference between a demo and something that runs reliably every cycle at scale.
Rigorous and fast. You hold a high bar but optimize relentlessly for action-relevant answers. You'd rather stand up a solid data foundation this quarter than architect the perfect platform over two years.
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 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.
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.