R&D Coordinating Officer, India at VakeWorks

R&D Coordinating Officer — India at VakeWorks

• Company: VakeWorks (VakeWorks India Pvt. Ltd., Chennai)
• Location: India — remote/hybrid, anywhere in India with a reliable high-bandwidth internet connection. Strong preference for Tamil Nadu or Kerala. Regular field travel, using public transport, is required.
• Engagement: Contract-based, hybrid, beginning with a probationary period of 4 to 12 weeks. The initial stipend/remuneration is commensurate with the candidate's abilities and demonstrated performance over that initial period, with a pathway to a longer-term remunerative relationship within VakeWorks' radically transparent workers' co-operative model. The role is fitted and matched, to a reasonable extent, to the successful candidate's strengths and interests.

COMPANY DESCRIPTION

VakeWorks is a small, family-owned, English-first Swedish multinational — modest in size, global in reach — headquartered in Torpshammar, Sweden, and operating through wholly-owned subsidiaries: VakeWorks India Pvt. Ltd. (office in Chennai) and our new operations in Kampala, Uganda. We are expanding across Southern India from our Chennai base.

We are, in our own words, a company of coding farmers and farming coders. Our mission is to create regenerative and resilient living systems that are economically profitable as well as ecologically and energetically sustainable. Through systems research and radically transparent food networks built over sovereign living and digital systems, we integrate income, produce, process, profits, and ecological transparency to drive real, measurable change. We work across agriculture, aquaculture, forestry, agritourism, and health, alongside knowledge-intensive fields such as data science, machine learning, any-scale food processing, microbial-systems R&D, and natural-resource management.

Our work is grounded in one unifying idea — the inseparability of seed sovereignty and digital sovereignty — expressed in our EAT, CODE and ACT theorems and made enforceable through the VakeWorks Transparency Pledge.

Theorems: https://vake.works/theorems/

Pledge: https://vake.works/pledge/

ABOUT THE ROLE

We are hiring an R&D Coordinating Officer for India. This is a broad, hands-on coordinating role for someone who genuinely lives a 'learn to do, do to learn' attitude.

At VakeWorks, 'R&D' is defined broadly. It spans field studies, agroecology, soil and microbial-systems health, and any-scale food processing — and equally the legal, accounting, multi-jurisdictional regulatory (food and IT), and information-technology work that real projects require. You will not be expected to do all of this yourself, or to be an expert in all of it. You will be expected to move any needed R&D forward, and to work alongside teammates who hold complementary expertise across our Sweden, Uganda and India teams.

We work in a humanagentic way. Following the thesis Satya Nadella has recently articulated — that every firm now compounds two assets: human capital (irreplaceable judgment and people skills) and token capital (the AI agents, workflows and tooling a firm builds and owns) — our team members pair their own judgment with AI agents on our IAS-governed, federated substrate. In practice this means moving fluidly between the farm and the Linux/Ubuntu terminal: speaking with a smallholder farmer in the morning and running an AI-assisted analysis or protocol in the afternoon.

Responsibilities include:

• Coordinating R&D activities end-to-end — planning studies, analysing data, managing projects, and compiling findings.
• Working directly with small-scale farmers in the field; conducting trials and testing hardware, firmware and software prototypes under real field conditions.
• Observing laboratory protocols and multi-jurisdictional compliance requirements when collecting testimonials, data and samples from farmers and communities.
• Testing and disseminating our Enablement, Empowerment, Certification & Compliance (E2C2) services, so that farmers, communities and partners have direct access to empowering, co-created knowledge over sovereign digital systems.
• Coordinating and reaching consensus-based decisions with our teams in Sweden, Uganda and India, in the collaborative Swedish corporate style.

The spirit of the role is not negotiable: we are looking for someone with the right attitude, who moves forward with whatever needs doing — not someone whose first instinct is 'that wasn't in my job description.' We are, however, realistic: no one does everything, and you will always have complementary experts beside you.

Working respectfully in the field is central to this role. Much of the work happens in villages and on smallholdings, frequently alongside tribal and Adivasi farming communities. It calls for someone who builds trust with humility and genuine respect — meeting farmers as equals, in their own homes and surroundings, on their own terms, and, wherever possible, in their own language. We are looking for a person with a deep and personal commitment to the wellbeing of small-scale and tribal farmers, and to seed, food and digital sovereignty. This is not a passing interest for us, and it cannot be one for you: if that commitment is not already yours, this is unlikely to be the right role.

We work in a radically transparent, consensus-based way: you will be included in decisions and free to understand how the whole company works, end to end. For that reason, some prior work experience — including in more conventional or siloed organisations — is an asset: it helps you appreciate this openness, and the breadth of work that comes with it. The role suits an entrepreneurially-minded person who sees being trusted with the full picture as an opportunity rather than a burden.

LEARNING IS PART OF THE JOB

VakeWorks funds up to 25% of your working time for structured learning relevant to the role. That can include AI and agent courses (for example, Anthropic and open-source AI curricula) and coding bootcamps; seminars on soil-microbial health and agroecology; and crash courses on the multi-jurisdictional protocols we must follow when collecting testimonials and samples from farmers. We invest in people who invest in learning.

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR

• A genuine 'learn to do, do to learn' attitude, and the initiative to carry any needed R&D forward.
• Comfort — or a real willingness to learn — moving between hands-on farming and the Linux/Ubuntu command line and AI-agent tooling.
• Real experience with, or a demonstrable ability to relate to and work respectfully alongside, small-scale farmers in India.
• English (required), plus at least one of: Malayalam, Tamil, Kannada, Telugu, Konkani, or Hindi.
• Strong analytical, communication and interpersonal skills for multidisciplinary, cross-continent collaboration.
• A foundation in — or willingness to learn and prove yourself in — research and laboratory methods, agroecologically sound food production, food processing, or natural-resource management. Prior exposure to any of these is an asset, not a gate.
• Education: high school, Bachelor's or Master's in a relevant field (for example science, engineering, agronomy, environmental studies, food science, or computer science) is preferred but is not a strict requirement.
• A reliable high-bandwidth internet connection and the flexibility to work in a hybrid setup with regular field travel using public transport. India-based; strong preference for Tamil Nadu or Kerala.

HOW TO APPLY

Learn more about us at https://vake.works. Apply via the LinkedIn job posting, or by email through https://vake.works/contact using the exact subject line: 'R&D Coordinating Officer, India — Application'.

Your application must include both of the following:

• A motivating cover letter with a brief statement of purpose for this particular role — tell us, briefly, why this role, at this company, now.
• A brief but comprehensive written summary of Dr. Vandana Shiva's talk 'We Are Seed, We Are Soil, We Are Shakti' (KEP 2023 Talk Series) — https://youtu.be/BmHArdujyGg — reflecting both your understanding of Dr. Shiva's perspective and your own deeper reflections on it.

NOTE: Applications missing either element will be rejected automatically.

Skills Required
agroecology , Linux Ubuntu, Food Processing