Head of Data Quality Systems

Job description

Head of Data Quality Systems

Remote, in a time zone between UTC+0 and UTC+4, with about 25% travel. Full ti

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A bit about us

Pula is an agricultural technology and insurance enterprise dedicated to empowering smallholder farmers across Africa. Within Data Services, our mission is to architect vital digital infrastructure - from building comprehensive farmer registries for governments and conducting precise farm mapping for EUDR compliance, to enabling credit risk assessment for lenders and advancing livestock traceability. Operating across multiple countries, our registries each touch the lives of hundreds of thousands of farmers.

Governments rely directly on these registries to determine subsidy distribution, issue national farmer IDs, and verify agricultural compliance. Because these systems serve as public digital infrastructure, we uphold rigorous standards for data accuracy, integrity, and trust.

Why this role exists.

Our registry business is growing fast, with more countries, farmers, and enumerators joining every year. We collect most of this data in the field using mobile phones, often in areas with poor network coverage. As we scale, we're looking for a senior leader to build and design the systems that keep our data quality consistently high across all programs.

You'll lead the team responsible for daily checks, audits, and reporting, while spending your time on overall system design, technical strategy, and team growth. Using AI well is a core part of this role. You’ll use AI models such as OCR, face matching and large language models to automate our checks, so you need to know where they work well, when a person should review their results, and how to keep them accurate and fair for every farmer.

What you'll be doing:

1. Setting the data quality standard for farmer registries: what a complete, verified record looks like, the evidence each type of farmer needs, and the targets each program works to.
2. Designing our data quality architecture, from the validation rules in the collection app to the pipelines that check every record as it arrives, the anomaly detection that flags unusual patterns by enumerator and by area, and the dashboards your team and project leads use.
3. Building the matching layer that links our records to national ID, land and other government databases, and the deduplication logic behind it.
4. Designing the verification system, meaning how back-checks, phone verification and audits are sampled, scored and acted on, so your team runs them the same way in every country.
5. Working with our product team so quality rules are built into the collection app.
6. Working with Field Operations on how enumerators are paid, supervised and trained, so the process rewards accurate records.
7. Making the whole system reusable, so every new registry launches on it from day one.
8. Owning how we present data quality to government clients, and leading those conversations at a senior level.
9. Making sure the system meets data protection law in each country we work in.
10. Hiring, leading and growing a team of analysts and engineers who run the daily checks, audits and reporting.

What we'd want to see in your first year

• You'll get up to speed on how each registry operates, align with Field Operations and Product on a single quality framework, and outline the system design and team structure you'll need.
• Your core system will be up and running across all active programs, managed day-to-day by your team with weekly quality reports flowing to every project lead.
• Every program will hit a clear audit benchmark like having at least 99% of records pass verification and any new registry will launch using your system right out of the gate.

What you'll bring:

You'll need:

• 8 or more years in data quality, data engineering or survey operations, with at least 4 years leading teams.
• A track record of designing and building data quality systems at scale, such as automated validation pipelines, anomaly detection and record linkage.
• Experience owning data quality on a national-scale field collection, like a census, national survey, or social or farmer registry, with 500,000 or more records.
• Experience building and leading a team that runs quality checks and audits day to day.
• Strong enough SQL and Python or R to set the technical direction and review your team's work.
• A good understanding of mobile collection tools like ODK, SurveyCTO, KoBo or CommCare, and how form design affects data quality.
• Clear English, and the ability to explain data to non-technical people, including senior government officials.

It would help if you also have:

• French. Several of our current and future markets are French-speaking, so this is a strong advantage.
• Experience with digital public infrastructure, ID systems, or World Bank or donor-funded registries.
• Experience with geospatial data, such as GPS points and farm boundaries.
• Experience with agriculture or smallholder farmer programs in Africa.

How we work:

You can work from anywhere in our time zone range, as long as you overlap with East African working hours. You'll travel to field sites and client meetings, especially when a new registry is starting, since that's when the field work is set up.