Development Chapter Lead

Farmforce; Oslo fylke; On-site; NOK 1,000,000 - 1,500,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary and benefits

Oslo, Norway in-office role

Global product with impact

Autonomy and ownership

Small high-performance team

Job summary

Farmforce in Oslo is seeking a Development Chapter Lead, the senior-most engineering leader shaping standards, architecture, and people across the Technology organization. Hands-on leadership includes coding, design, and review, with CTO collaboration to evolve how we build software.

You bring deep architecture knowledge, current hands-on skills, and a proven track record managing engineers. Fluent English is required; Norwegian is a plus, and you’ll be in the office regularly.

Qualifications

• Strong software architecture background with experience architecting systems at scale.
• Experience defining and driving engineering standards across a developer organization.
• Current hands-on engineering skills, not just management.
• Proven leadership of engineers with ability to set direction and maintain a technical bar.
• Fluent English; Norwegian is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Own the software development capability: standards, practices, tooling, and maturity.
• Define and drive coding standards and code review practices across all delivery teams.
• Lead architectural reviews and ensure decisions align with technology direction.
• Own and reduce technical debt, including AI-assisted development impact.
• Champion AI-assisted development as a standing expectation.
• People responsibility for developers: performance, wellbeing, career development.
• Contribute hands-on design, implementation, and code review within delivery teams.
• Collaborate with QA to verify AI-generated code with disciplined verification.

Skills

Software architecture

Hands-on engineering

People leadership

AI-first mindset

English fluency

Education

Master's degree in Computer Science / Data Science / AI

Tools

Java

Python

Job description

Development Chapter Lead

Farmforce

Farmforce builds supply chain traceability software for the global food industry. Our platform connects food companies directly to the farms that supply them, tracking over one million farmers across 30+ countries in Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. We are a ~50-person company headquartered in Oslo, with offices in Abidjan, Bangkok, and Guatemala City.

We are in an deliberate investment: building an AI-first engineering organization that develops software smarter, faster, and more impactful. The person we hire for this role is at the centre of that transformation.

Industry: Information Technology & Services

Employment Type: Full-time

Job Opening: Development Chapter Lead

Location: Oslo, Norway. Regular in-office presence required.

Start date: First week of January 2027 (target). Earlier availability is a plus.

Languages: Fluent English required. Norwegian preferred. French, Spanish, or Thai a bonus.

The role

The Development Chapter Lead is the senior-most engineering leadership position at Farmforce, reporting directly to the CTO, and member of the tech leadership team. You own the software development capability of the entire Technology organization: its standards, architecture, maturity, and people.

In Farmforce's delivery model, the Development Chapter Lead holds organizational-level engineering authority. You define the standards that all developers follow across delivery teams, make architectural decisions that last, and hold the team to the technical bar you set, all in collaboration with the CTO. You also contribute actively as a senior engineer in a product squad. Hands‑on involvement is a core expectation. This is a hands‑on leadership role, not a pure‑management or pure‑IC seat. You will set engineering standards, architect, lead people, and write code, and the balance between those shifts with what the chapter needs.

You will work closely with the CTO to reshape how Farmforce builds software. If you want to build something that matters and leave a mark on how a global technology organization operates, this is that role. This way of working is new and still evolving. You will help define it, not inherit it.

What you will do

• Own the software development capability at Farmforce: standards, practices, tooling, and maturity
• Define and drive adoption of coding standards and code review practices across all delivery teams
• Lead architectural reviews for significant changes and ensure technical decisions are consistent, sustainable, and aligned with Farmforce's technology direction
• Own the technical debt strategy: make it visible, prioritized, and systematically reduced, including the debt that AI‑assisted development generates faster than traditional workflows
• Champion AI‑assisted development across the entire developer team, not as a project, but as a standing expectation embedded in how the chapter plans, builds, and reviews its work
• Hold personnel responsibility for all Developers: performance, wellbeing, career development, and competence evaluation
• Contribute hands‑on to design, implementation, and code review within your delivery team
• Partner with the QA Chapter Lead on test and verification strategy: with AI‑generated code, disciplined verification is how we trust what agents produce, not an afterthought

What we are looking for

You are a systems thinker and a practitioner. You bring deep architecture knowledge, current hands‑on engineering skills, and proven experience setting technical direction across a developer organization. You have held personnel responsibility for developers and take that seriously.

What matters as much as your technical depth is your mindset. We care more about how you approach engineering than the specific tools you currently use. You have moved beyond AI as autocomplete: you design how engineering work gets planned, delegated to agents, and verified, and you have helped others work that way too. You hold high standards for yourself and raise the bar for those around you, by example as much as by direction.

Required

• Strong software architecture background, with demonstrated judgment architecting systems at scale
• Proven track record of defining and driving engineering standards across a developer organization
• Current hands‑on engineering skills, not historical
• Demonstrated leadership of engineers, formal or informal, with the judgment to set direction and hold a technical bar
• Genuine AI‑first mindset: you have moved beyond AI as autocomplete, and design how work gets planned, delegated to, and verified from AI agents
• Fluent English (primary working language at Farmforce)

Good to have

• Mobile development experience
• Familiarity with Java and/or Python
• Norwegian language skills (Oslo‑based role with regular in‑office presence)
• French, Spanish, or Thai (we work closely with teams in Abidjan, Bangkok, and Guatemala City)
• Experience with distributed and cloud‑native architectures

On the tech stack:

Farmforce's primary stack is Java and Python. We care more about how you think and build than the specific language you currently work in. A strong architectural foundation and an AI‑first mindset matter more to us than years in a particular toolchain. The stack is learnable. The attitude is not.

On education

A Master's degree in Computer Science, Data Science, or Artificial Intelligence is a definite plus. That said, equivalent experience, the right mindset, and a genuine commitment to continuous learning matter more to us than a formal diploma. If the rest of this ad speaks to you, we want to hear from you.

This role is probably not for you, if:

In short: not a vibe coder, not a hands‑off manager, not an AI‑skeptic engineer. This role needs all three held at once: technical depth, people leadership, and a genuine AI‑first practice.

• Your hands‑on engineering experience is more than a couple of years behind you
• You have not yet held real personnel responsibility: the 1-on-1s, the career conversations, the difficult feedback
• You see AI as a productivity add‑on to how you already work, rather than something that reshapes how engineering gets planned and delivered
• You are most comfortable with a clearly defined mandate in a stable, well‑established organization

If any of those describe you right now, we respect that. It is just not the right match for this role and this moment.

What we offer

• A defining role in Farmforce's engineering transformation, in close partnership with the CTO
• Personnel leadership of a developer team across cross‑functional delivery squads
• High autonomy with clear accountability: you own the domain
• Competitive salary and benefits, Oslo, Norway
• A genuinely global product with purpose: the software you build supports the livelihoods and supply chain transparency of millions of smallholder farmers worldwide
• A small, high‑ownership team where your decisions are visible and consequential