ABOUT SYNGENTA

Syngenta Group is a $28B leading science-based agtech company, operating in more than 100 countries, with more than 50’000 employees. We are proud to stand at the forefront of the tech revolution in agriculture. Using the latest digital innovations, data, and cutting-edge technologies we want to transform the way that crops are managed and enable farmers and agronomists to enhance efficiency and sustainable food production.

Our business success reflects the quality and skill of our people. We recognize that human diversity is as important to our business as biodiversity. Embracing the unique perspectives and capabilities of our employees helps us continue to catalyze innovation, maximize performance, and create business value. Join us and help shape the future of agriculture.

We are seeking a highly motivated and skilled Global Computation Agronomy Lead Scientist to join our Computation Agronomy Department. As a Computation Agronomy Lead Scientist, you will manage talent within the department and use your agronomic knowledge, data management, and predictive analytics skills to create data-driven insights and digital capabilities. You will work in a dynamic and interdisciplinary environment with regional and global teams of agronomists, crop modelers, data scientists, and data engineers to build prescriptive and predictive models and agronomic recommendations that are used in digital tools to help growers make better management decisions and improve agronomic outcomes. The primary focus of this function will be in crop nutrition and pest modeling and management (diseases, weeds, and insects).

Essential Duties & Responsibilities: 

• Develop scalable approaches that integrate large farmer and trial databases, remote sensing, crop and pest modeling, machine learning, and/or advance statistics to support grower decisions on nutrient and pest management.
• Leverage heterogenous data across the growing season(s) including soil, weather, IoT, remote sensing, farmer and experimental field data, and others to create predictive and prescriptive models.
• Lead talent and research projects, collaboratively developing and executing project plans in partnership with multiple stakeholders across borders – functions, regions, countries, businesses (Crop Protection & Seeds) and companies.
• Collaborate with team members to conduct reproducible, scalable, and high-quality research with a focus on gaining process efficiency and the creation of customer value.
• Write robust, well-documented, and well-tested research code and documentation that adhere to the community standards.
• Summarize and communicate actionable insights to relevant stakeholders across the organization, including, but not limited to, agronomists, data scientists, and data engineers.

Knowledge, experience & capabilities

• PhD in Agronomy, crop physiology, plant pathology or related studies with demonstrated knowledge of agricultural cropping systems.
• Demonstrated knowledge and expertise in computational and statistical methods and a similarly strong background in general agronomy and cropping systems around the world.
• Proficiency with programming languages like R or Python is essential with experience in translating scientific models into code.
• Highly proficient in spoken and written English
• Proactive, highly motivated individual with solid organizational, interpersonal, and communication skills.
• Ability to solve and communicate challenging and complex analytical problems in a clear, precise, and actionable manner, and a willingness to extend own interests into new fields of research and development.
• Experience in crop modeling and applications of machine learning or hierarchical statistical modeling is a plus.
• Preference may be given to candidates with some of the following Knowledge, Experience, & Skills: Field trialing, farming experience or grower advisory, field agronomy supporting sales, crop simulation models, machine learning techniques.

WHAT WE OFFER

• A role which contributes to valuable and impactful work in a stimulating and international environment

• Flexible working arrangements and environment with an open culture and diverse workforce, a possibility of working from home

• Competitive salary and benefits package
• The opportunity to work with and learn from highly qualified and experienced employees
• A culture that promotes work/life balance, celebrates diversity and offers numerous events throughout the year
• Learning culture and a wide range of development options, including access to learning platforms (Degreed, LinkedIn Learning, O’Reilly)

• High quality office environment

Syngenta has been ranked as a top employer by Science Journal.
Learn more about our team and our mission here:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVCN_51GbNI

Syngenta is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate in recruitment, hiring, training, promotion or any other employment practices for reasons of race, color, religion, gender, national origin, age, sexual orientation, marital or veteran status, disability, or any other legally protected status.