Farm-Data Platform Stabilisation Leader — Crop Intelligence

The mandate

The platform vice president resigned after three regional ingestion failures silently excluded farm blocks from pest and irrigation forecasts during a critical growing window. Customer teams issued manual corrections, but sensor, machinery, satellite and agronomist observations still carry incompatible field identities and uncertain freshness. A board review found that product margin also ignores costly seasonal reconciliation performed outside engineering budgets.

The interim will join within one month for twelve months, holding the executive data-product seat through the next complete crop cycle. A permanent search starts after the first harvest retrospective clarifies the role’s agronomy and platform balance. Six weeks are reserved for successor field visits and operating shadowing; conversion is possible only through the open search, and extension depends on crop-calendar continuity.

Handover is complete when planted-area coverage reconciles daily, missing or stale field inputs produce visible product consequences, and two seasonal peaks meet recovery and forecast-publication commitments across priority regions. Finance must adopt product-level ingestion and support costs. The successor will approve a live regional readiness review, accept unresolved source limitations and own the next season’s investment choices.

The interim may pause a forecast product, quarantine unreliable sources, set field-identity rules, redirect the approved R$95 million roadmap and appoint seasonal specialists. Entry into a new country, changes to agronomic liability, long-term supplier commitments, permanent appointments and spend above the envelope need CEO or board approval. The authority cannot make farm-management decisions on a customer’s behalf.

Seed-selection algorithms, marketplace pricing and acquisition strategy are outside this assignment. The leader may require interfaces and evidence where they consume field data, but does not own agronomic research, physical sensor manufacture or historical data repair with no live contractual or model consequence. The recovery must privilege present-season trust over an unbounded data-cleaning programme.

Why this seat is open

The failures demonstrated that a nominally horizontal platform did not account for seasonal, regional and agronomic consequences of missing data. The vice president’s departure removed the only cross-functional prioritisation point during an active crop cycle. A temporary executive must restore customer trust and make the permanent position accountable for both field reality and data-product economics.

What you will own

• Establish canonical farm, field, crop, season and operation identities across machinery, sensor, satellite, laboratory and human-observation sources.
• Decide source acceptance, quarantine and substitution rules using freshness, coverage, calibration, provenance and downstream agronomic consequence.
• Rebuild regional readiness around crop calendars, connectivity constraints, ingestion capacity, support coverage and forecast-publication cut-offs.
• Instrument missingness so every product reveals affected hectares, customers, recommendations and confidence rather than silently shrinking its input population.
• Reconcile platform and seasonal support cost to product, geography and source, exposing manual field work previously hidden in customer operations.
• Direct two peak simulations and live retrospectives that test backlog recovery, delayed imagery, machinery-schema change and regional communication.
• Induct the permanent successor through farm visits, customer reviews, an operational readiness decision and signed acceptance of source and margin debt.

Candidate qualifications

• Led data platforms for agriculture, mining, energy, logistics or another physical vertical where remote source conditions shaped digital-product reliability.
• Operated multisource geospatial and time-series ingestion across intermittent connectivity, changing equipment schemas and time-critical decision windows.
• Quantified the customer or agronomic consequence of missing data rather than reporting pipeline completeness as an isolated engineering measure.
• Built vertical data-product economics that included field integration, seasonal support, source licensing and manual reconciliation effort.
• Held executive authority during a live seasonal failure and balanced transparent product limitation with customer continuity and commercial pressure.
• Completed a platform leadership transition that required the successor to understand physical operations, not merely software architecture.

Non-negotiables

• Available inside one month with extensive São Paulo presence and regular travel to farms in Mato Grosso during planting and harvest windows.
• Fluent professional Portuguese and capable of challenging engineers, agronomists, farm operators and commercial leaders without intermediated translation.
• No undisclosed financial relationship with machinery, imagery, sensor or agronomy-data suppliers under active platform review.
• Will state product limitations to customers when coverage evidence is weak, even where doing so affects seasonal renewal discussions.

1. 49 words maximum. State your Brazil availability and the largest physical-world data platform for which you held outcome authority.
2. 49 words maximum. How did you expose the downstream decision consequence of silent missingness in a field or industrial dataset?
3. 49 words maximum. Which costs belong in a farm-data product margin that a conventional cloud ledger will miss?