Volunteer Backend Engineer to Help Smallholder Farmers with eKutir

This is an opportunity to work with an Ashoka Fellow. Ashoka Fellows are leading social entrepreneurs that have been taken through a rigorous selection process, testing the quality of their ideas and character, to become part of the Ashoka Fellowship and Network. They take on the challenges of building innovative system change ideas to make and spread social impact in a world wrought with challenges.

This is an unpaid, volunteer opportunity.

About The Affiliated Organization

eKutir was founded to address a fundamental failure in global agriculture: despite being the backbone of food security, rural livelihoods, and climate resilience, smallholder farmers remain disconnected from markets, finance, data, and decision‑making because the system operates in silos. Inputs, advisory, finance, insurance, buyers, and climate programs all work on separate platforms, creating inefficiency, mistrust, and exclusion. eKutir was created to build a shared digital infrastructure that connects these fragmented actors into one trusted ecosystem.

Through its Digital Agriculture Exchange, eK Link, eKutir enables farmers, cooperatives, agri‑businesses, financial institutions, governments, and climate programs to operate on a common data and transaction layer. Smallholder farmers and their producer organizations gain a digital identity, land and crop records, soil and advisory services, access to quality inputs, buyers, credit, insurance, and climate‑linked income streams, while agri‑enterprises, lenders, and public agencies receive verified, field‑level data that reduces risk, improves traceability, and enables outcome‑based delivery of services.

By integrating AI‑driven intelligence with real‑world data from farms, eKutir transforms raw information into actionable insights—what to plant, how to manage soil, when to intervene, how much to finance, and how to measure impact. This work is critically important because agriculture lies at the intersection of three global crises: food insecurity, farmer poverty, and climate change. Trillions of dollars are being mobilized for sustainable food systems, regenerative agriculture, and climate action, but without reliable digital infrastructure at the farm level, these resources cannot be deployed efficiently or equitably. eKutir is building that missing backbone: a neutral, interoperable, and trusted digital operating system for land, food, and climate, enabling value, trust, and impact to flow across the entire ecosystem.

For more information, please visit www.ekutirsb.com.

Job Description

This project is eK Flow, eKutir’s climate‑smart agriculture platform that integrates farm, soil, crop, climate, and market data into a single digital system to enable climate‑resilient farming, regenerative practices, and verifiable climate impact at the field level. The goal of eK Flow is to create a real‑time digital nervous system for agriculture that allows farmers, cooperatives, agri‑businesses, financial institutions, and climate programs to make data‑driven decisions while measuring soil health, productivity, and carbon outcomes with high integrity.

Our Back‑end Engineer will support data engineering, platform integration, AI/analytics models, climate and soil data pipelines, user dashboards, and API connectivity between eK Flow and external systems such as satellite, weather, soil labs, and farm management tools. Your work will directly enable credible climate‑smart agriculture at scale by ensuring that farm‑level data is accurate, interoperable, and actionable—unlocking climate finance, improving farmer incomes, and making regenerative agriculture measurable, bankable, and trustworthy.

Please let us know today if you can help!

Volunteer Logistics

• Estimated hours required per week: 10hrs
• Estimated duration of the project: 3‑6 months
• This position is Virtual (Remote)

Language Requirements

English

Desired Skills And Experience

For the eK Flow climate‑smart agriculture platform, the volunteer back‑end engineer should bring strong capability in building secure, scalable, data‑intensive cloud applications. The role requires deep proficiency in Node.js and/or Python (Django or FastAPI) for developing high‑performance REST and event‑driven APIs that manage farmer, land, soil, crop, climate, and transaction data. You should be skilled in database architecture and optimization using PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or similar systems, including indexing, schema design, and analytics‑friendly data models.

Experience with authentication, authorization (RBAC), JWT/OAuth, API versioning, and security hardening is essential because eK Flow handles sensitive land, financial, and climate‑impact data. The platform also relies on data pipelines and integrations with external systems such as weather services, satellite providers, soil labs, and payment or carbon registries, so familiarity with API integrations, message queues, and asynchronous processing is important.

A working knowledge of CI/CD, cloud deployment, logging, monitoring, and automated testing is required to ensure reliability at scale. Most importantly, you should be comfortable working in mission‑critical, data‑driven environments where software directly impacts farmer livelihoods, climate outcomes, and financial trust.