Volunteer Full Stack 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. They refuse to let the ‘impossible’ stand in their way to creating a better world. 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.

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.

As a Full Stack Engineer, you 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.

Volunteer Logistics

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

Language Requirements: English

Desired Skills And Experience

For the eK Flow climate-smart agriculture platform, a Full Stack Engineer should possess the ability to design, build, and operate end-to-end digital systems that connect farmers, land, climate, and markets. This requires strong proficiency in modern front-end frameworks such as React, Next.js, or similar, to create intuitive, data-rich user interfaces for farmers, cooperatives, and ecosystem partners, combined with deep expertise in back-end development using Node.js and/or Python (Django, FastAPI) to build secure, scalable APIs and business logic. You should be skilled in database design and optimization across PostgreSQL, MongoDB, or equivalent systems to manage high-volume farm, soil, climate, and transaction data. Experience with authentication, role-based access control, and API security (JWT/OAuth) is essential to protect sensitive land and financial records. The role also requires capability in integrating external data sources such as weather, satellite, soil labs, and payment or carbon registries through APIs and event-driven workflows. Familiarity with cloud deployment, CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, logging, and monitoring is needed to ensure the platform is reliable and scalable. Above all, you must be comfortable working in a data-intensive, mission-critical environment where technology directly influences farmer incomes, climate outcomes, and the credibility of the entire agricultural ecosystem.