Lead Grower and Agronomist

SkyAcres; Surrey; On-site; CAD 60,000 - 75,000; Full time

Job summary

SkyAcres in Surrey, BC is seeking an experienced grower to lead agronomy across our growing network. You will work directly with the CEO, crop team, engineers, and customer growers to improve quality, yield, and pest management.

This hands‑on role requires living on-site at our Surrey facility with travel to sites for trials, training, and support. You will develop clear procedures and scalable best practices for commercial crops.

Qualifications

• Commercial growing experience matters most.
• Experience with strawberries, tomatoes, leafy greens, or other high‑value crops at commercial scale.
• Degree or diploma in agronomy, horticulture, plant science or related field.
• Equivalent commercial experience welcome.
• Practical understanding of crop physiology and plant responses.
• Experience with integrated pest management, biological control, scouting, and action thresholds.
• Comfort working with environmental metrics (DLI, VPD, EC, pH, etc).
• Experience designing trials that isolate variables and produce useful conclusions.
• Clear technical writing; ability to create repeatable procedures.
• Valid Class 5 driver’s license or equivalent.
• Legally eligible to work in Canada and travel to the United States.

Responsibilities

• Lead agronomic planning across our Surrey R&D facility and customer growing sites.
• Audit and improve crop procedures, trial records, and growing specifications.
• Design and run controlled crop trials with replication and measurement.
• Diagnose crop health, quality, and yield issues at our facility and customer sites.
• Own scouting and biological pest management across locations.
• Train crop technicians and customer growers on the procedures you develop.
• Work with the software team to bring growing procedures, alerts, and sensor-driven decisions into the SkyAcres grower app.
• Support technical conversations with prospective customers about crop performance.
• Travel to customer sites for commissioning, training, and crop support.

Skills

Commercial growing experience

Crop physiology understanding

Trial design

Technical writing

Travel willing

Driver's license

Education

Degree or diploma in agronomy, horticulture, plant science

Job description

About SkyAcres

Workplace: On site, with travel to customer growing sites

Position: Full-time contract, 3 to 6 months

Compensation: CAD $60,000 to $75,000 annualized

Start date: As soon as the right person is available

SkyAcres builds Drop-In indoor farms for the cold storage rooms, packhouses, and barns farmers already own.

Our growing hardware and software help farmers produce food throughout the year inside buildings they already have. No plumbing, no pumps, and no HVAC retrofit. Farmers operate their own facilities and keep their crops. We provide the growing system and the agronomy behind it.

Our systems support leafy greens, herbs, strawberries, tomatoes, and other fruits and vegetables. We manage pests biologically and have never sprayed a chemical pesticide in our farms.

Google for Startups North America named SkyAcres a Top 20 Tech Startup. Cornell’s Grow-NY program named us a Top 20 AgTech startup worldwide.

The opportunity

We are looking for an experienced grower who loves solving crop problems and wants to shape how food is grown across a growing network of farms.

You will lead agronomy at SkyAcres. You will work directly with our CEO, crop team, engineers, and customer growers to improve crop quality, yield, consistency, and biological pest management.

This is a hands-on role. You will spend time in the grow hall with the plants, run trials, study the results, and turn what works into clear procedures that other people can follow.

You will have room to question our assumptions and improve our existing work. We want someone who is curious, generous with what they know, and comfortable saying, "Let’s test it.".

Your first-term focus

Your initial work will centre on romaine lettuce, strawberries, and cherry tomatoes.

You will help us:

• Improve crop quality, flavour, yield, and consistency.
• Strengthen our biological pest-management program, including scouting, action thresholds, beneficial insect releases, and incoming plant protocols.
• Build and validate crop strategies around lighting, temperature, humidity, airflow, plant density, nutrition, pollination, and harvest timing.
• Design controlled trials that answer specific questions and produce useful results.
• Turn trial results into practical growing procedures for our team and customer growers.
• Establish clear crop-performance benchmarks that we can measure over time.

What you will do

• Lead agronomic planning across our Surrey R&D facility and customer growing sites.
• Audit and improve our crop procedures, trial records, and growing specifications.
• Design and run controlled crop trials with appropriate replication and measurement.
• Diagnose crop-health, quality, and yield issues at our facility and customer sites.
• Own scouting and biological pest management across growing locations.
• Train crop technicians and customer growers on the procedures you develop.
• Work with our software team to bring growing procedures, alerts, and sensor-driven decisions into the SkyAcres grower app.
• Support technical conversations with prospective customers who want to understand crop performance.
• Travel to customer sites for commissioning, training, and crop support.

Most travel is within Surrey and the Fraser Valley. Occasional trips may include Kelowna, Calgary, Alaska, and other Canadian or US locations.

What we are looking for

Commercial growing experience matters most. You have worked with strawberries, tomatoes, leafy greens, or other high-value crops at commercial scale. That experience may come from a greenhouse, indoor facility, nursery, or field operation.

You should also bring:

• A degree or diploma in agronomy, horticulture, plant science, or a related field. Equivalent commercial experience is welcome.
• A practical understanding of crop physiology and the ability to explain why a plant is responding the way it is.
• Experience with integrated pest management, biological control agents, scouting, and action thresholds.
• Comfort working with DLI, VPD, EC, pH, root-zone temperature, dissolved oxygen, and other environmental measurements.
• Experience designing trials that isolate variables and produce useful conclusions.
• Clear technical writing. A major part of this role is creating procedures that other people can use successfully.
• A valid Class 5 driver’s licence or equivalent.
• Legal eligibility to work in Canada and the ability to travel to the United States.

You do not need to know the SkyAcres system on your first day. We will give you the history, data, tools, and support you need to learn it. We care about how you think, how you work with plants, and how you help other people become better growers.

What we offer

• Real ownership over agronomy and crop performance.
• The opportunity to run meaningful trials with clear commercial outcomes.
• Direct access to the people building the hardware and software.
• Work that reaches farms and growers outside our own facility.
• A team that values evidence, thoughtful questions, and learning from results.
• The opportunity to move into a permanent position after the initial contract.