Location: All India. Based in Bengaluru, with project sites across the country and extensive travel.
Employment: Full-time
Function: AgOps, working closely with Agronomy and Supply Chain
Reports to: Head AgOps
About FinAgra
FinAgra is building a new model for commercial agriculture in emerging markets. We combine financing, agronomy, technology, and farm operations to turn underperforming farmland into professionally managed, productive farming businesses.
Role Summary
FinAgra is looking for an irrigation engineer to own the technical design of irrigation systems across our project sites, covering horticulture and agri crops. Each site needs a system matched to its crop, soil, water source and season, at a capital cost that pays back quickly and that can, wherever possible, be redeployed to another site.
This is a purely technical role. You will assess fields and existing infrastructure, choose the irrigation method, produce the design and technical specification, evaluate supplier proposals on technical merit, and supervise installation and in-season performance. Quotations, negotiation and supplier selection sit with the supply chain team, with whom you will work closely.
What You Will Do
Field assessment and design
- Survey each new project site for topography, soil type, water source, water quality, discharge and availability, and determine the irrigation requirement for the crop and acreage.
- Assess pre-existing irrigation infrastructure at the site and establish what can be reused, what needs upgrading and what must be replaced.
- Select the appropriate irrigation method for each site and justify the choice on agronomic and technical grounds: drip (inline and online), sprinkler, micro-sprinkler, rain gun, mini-sprinkler, furrow and surface, and, where relevant, centre pivot or semi-permanent portable systems.
- Match the irrigation method to the economics of the crop. For high-value crops, specify the system that maximises yield, uniformity and fertigation control, where a higher capital cost per acre is justified by the return. For low-value and bulk crops, where cost per acre is the binding constraint, design the lowest-cost workable system that still delivers adequate and timely water. Cost is optimised against crop value, but water adequacy is never traded away.
- Prepare hydraulic designs, layouts and Bills of Quantity: mainlines, sublines, laterals, emitters and spacing, filtration (screen, disc, sand, hydrocyclone), venturi and fertigation units, valves, air-release and flush assemblies, pump and motor sizing, and head-loss calculations.
- Design for relocatability wherever the crop and inter-row spacing allow, maximising salvage value of laterals, sublines and filters when a system moves to another site.
Technical specification and evaluation
- Draft the technical and functional specification for each system, in a form the supply chain team can take to market.
- Assess supplier proposals on technical merit against that specification, flag gaps and deviations, and provide a written technical recommendation.
- Support Total Cost of Ownership and Cost Benefit Analysis calculations, including cost per acre and expected payback, where the business needs them.
- Coordinate closely with the supply chain team, which owns quotations, negotiation and supplier selection.
Installation and commissioning
- Supervise installation at site: trenching, laying, jointing, pressure testing, commissioning and handover.
- Verify that material delivered to site matches the approved technical specification.
- Train REPs and field teams on operation, valve and zone scheduling, filter cleaning, flushing and routine maintenance.
- Troubleshoot in-season issues such as clogging, pressure variation, uneven discharge, leakages and pump problems, and fix the root causes.
Fertigation and season support
- Work with the Agronomy team to convert crop nutrition plans into fertigation schedules the system can actually run, including injection rates,…