Volunteer for a startup building climate-resilient agriculture in the Caribbean! 🌴🚜

Soil Sista helps Caribbean farmers build climate-resilient, profitable farms through digital planning tools, practical farm services, and regenerative agriculture support.

Smallholder farmers across the Caribbean and Small Island Developing States face escalating climate shocks and volatile markets while carrying immense financial risk. Daily farm management requires tracking weather, soil health, financial records, and market data, yet this crucial information remains scattered across notebooks, disconnected apps, and informal conversations. This fragmented data slows down critical decision-making, reducing farm profitability, delaying disaster recovery, and leaving local food systems fragile and vulnerable to ecological collapse.

Soil Sista resolves this decision gap by unifying digital farm management with hands-on regenerative agriculture support tailored specifically for Caribbean conditions. Our platform digitizes proven farm-planning systems into an affordable digital tool that streamlines decision-making, tracks field performance, and enhances profitability for smallholders. Beyond software, Soil Sista operates a regional R&D platform to rigorously test seeds and climate technologies, plans to establish a local biofactory for affordable biological inputs, and runs targeted programs for youth agricultural training and underused farm revitalization. By bridging digital decision tools with practical, on-the-ground services, Soil Sista empowers farmers to reduce financial risk, recover faster from climate shocks, and secure regional food sovereignty.

Role (Volunteer, unpaid): Full-Stack Software Engineer

Role Description: We’re looking for a Volunteer Product Engineer to help build the Research Trial Workspace within Soil Sista’s digital Research & Development Platform.

You’ll be joining at a pivotal stage as Soil Sista prepares to launch its first international agricultural research trials.

This is not a greenfield project.

The platform already includes an established technical foundation with authentication, role-based permissions, database architecture, and backend services built using React, TypeScript, Supabase, and PostgreSQL.

Working directly with the Founder and Product Owner, you’ll help transform that foundation into a production-ready workspace used by researchers, agronomists, and trial coordinators managing real agricultural research across multiple Caribbean countries.

What You'll Build

Working alongside the Founder, you’ll help deliver a Research Trial Workspace that enables researchers and trial coordinators to:

• Manage active agricultural research trials
• Monitor trial progress in real time
• Navigate participating countries, organisations, research sites, experiments, and experimental units
• Review observations, submitted data, and supporting evidence
• Identify incomplete, inconsistent, or flagged submissions
• Monitor research quality through a clean, responsive interface across desktop, tablet, and mobile devices

You’ll also contribute to:

• Feature development
• UI refinement
• Code reviews
• Bug fixes
• Testing and quality assurance
• Iterative product improvements

Project Milestones

By Early September

Deliver a working demonstration of the Research Trial Workspace suitable for stakeholder presentations, partner demonstrations, and pilot discussions.

By November

Deliver a functional Research Trial Workspace supporting Soil Sista’s first international agricultural research programme, including:

• Trial navigation and progress tracking
• Observation and data review
• Photo and supporting evidence review
• Responsive desktop, tablet, and mobile interfaces
• Clear loading, empty, error, and permission states

Success will be measured by delivering a stable, intuitive workspace capable of supporting live agricultural research operations.

Impact of This Role

Your work will provide researchers and trial coordinators with the tools needed to manage high-quality agricultural field trials across the Caribbean.

By improving how research data is collected, reviewed, and monitored, you’ll help accelerate the evaluation of climate-resilient technologies—including seed technologies, biological inputs, crop varieties, and production practices—before they reach farmers.

As Soil Sista grows, this platform will become a core part of future agricultural research and innovation across the region.

Who We're Looking For

This role is ideal for someone who:

• Has experience with React and TypeScript
• Is comfortable working with Supabase or PostgreSQL
• Enjoys building clean, intuitive user interfaces
• Can contribute confidently to an existing codebase
• Understands responsive and mobile-first development
• Communicates clearly and works independently
• Enjoys solving real-world problems through technology

Experience with API-driven applications, research software, GIS, or agricultural technology is an advantage, but not required.

What You'll Gain

• Build production software used in real international agricultural research
• Work directly with the Founder and Product Owner of an emerging climate-tech company
• Gain hands-on experience with React, TypeScript, Supabase, PostgreSQL, and modern product development
• Contribute to a platform supporting agricultural innovation across the Caribbean
• Develop a portfolio project with real-world impact and measurable outcomes

Out of Scope

This role does not include:

• Rebuilding the backend architecture or authentication system
• Designing the farmer-facing platform
• Rewriting the application from scratch

Instead, you’ll build on an established technical foundation to help deliver the first production-ready Research Trial Workspace for Soil Sista’s international agricultural R&D programme.

Time Commitment: Volunteer 7-9 hours per week for 3-5 months remotely 💻

If you want to make change happen, apply to volunteer with Soil Sista now!