About the Role

This is a rare opportunity to lead one of the most ambitious applied R&D programs in sustainable housing in Africa.

We are seeking an R&D Director to drive breakthrough innovations for rural families, making their homes more durable, healthy, and beautiful. After years of building a foundation of impact, we are ready to scale. In this role, you will improve existing products and design new sustainable housing solutions, transforming homes and lives. With over 600 teammates ready to distribute new products, your work will have immediate, tangible impact.

As a key member of the Senior Management Team, you will serve as the in-house expert and leader on research. You will define and drive the R&D agenda, prioritize high-impact ideas, and collaborate with the senior team to scale successful solutions across the region.

The responsibilities of this role will include, but certainly not be limited to:

Identify Key R&D Needs

• Identify key product and research needs through meeting with clients in the field for feedback, inspecting our products in use, understanding the biggest construction challenges from masons, and talking with the Senior Management Team. Use this data to identify product failures and product components or attributes that need improvement, and priorities for new products to be designed. 
• Understand what drives perceived value in clients, in order to prioritize various initiatives in the R&D pipeline
• Initial priority areas include
  • Materials innovation (e.g. stabilization methods, cement alternatives such as Oxara, developing ways to analyse local clays and sands to reduce use of trucks for material delivery)
  • Construction speed and scalability of earthen floors (e.g. reducing drying time, automation of floor construction) – our current construction process takes one month.
  • Managing moisture in low cost ways (e.g. rain resilience of plaster, or methods of preventing capillary rise that are cheaper than a DPM)
  • Reducing cost/construction time of structural or architectural housing elements through innovation or mass production (e.g. rammed earth foundations, poured earth floors/foundations, CSEBs)
  • New product development (e.g. bamboo roof sheets, lime plaster)

Develop External Partnerships

• Manage and recruit new members to a technical advisory board to advise and support research agenda development
• Establish and manage partnerships with universities, labs, and industry experts (e.g., partnerships with universities and corporate bio-resin and flooring labs for research we cannot do-in-house) to outsource aspects of our R&D
• Engage with global standards bodies (e.g. writing and contributing research to an ASTM standard for an earthen floor which we can use as a base standard for new countries we expand to)
• Closely manage external partnerships to ensure steady progress, lead innovations to get field tested, and provide feedback on their success or failure

Execute Against R&D Agenda

• Lead, coach, and develop a team of ~10 engineers and scientists across Rwanda, Uganda and Kenya
• Build team capabilities in experimental design, data analysis, and product development
• Recruit additional talent as needed
• Create research protocols, and ensure rigorous execution and analysis
• Track and push forward multiple research projects simultaneously
• Develop research and design agenda by weighing priorities and considering criteria such as: potential for impact, cost-benefit, and likelihood of success
• Research existing options that we could learn from or adopt that would solve our clients’ problems
• Allocate resources from the R&D budget towards this pipeline of research and design projects 
• Create a decision trees to present to management that indicate next steps based on broad outcomes of every project

Communicate Across Internal Company

• Communicate findings and tradeoffs effectively to CEO and management team to make decisions about where to invest next (e.g. at specific forks in the road)
• Communicate research agenda to full company and get feedback when appropriate
• Share insights and progress across the organization 

Transition Learnings to Implementation or Additional Research

• Transition unsuccessful experiments to a new research arm or document reasons for failure
• Work closely with construction and quality teams to implement successful innovations
• Ensure smooth transition from R&D to field deployment
• Publish findings that may be helpful or relevant to the scientific community

• Required qualifications & Key capabilities.
  
• 5-10 years work experience, preferably having led an R&D / design department or an R&D/design team
• Master’s degree in material science, structural engineering, earthen construction, or a related field (PhD preferred)
• Ability to be creative, strategic, analytical, and think outside the box to solve problems
• Humble and patient team-player who loves to coach and develop junior teammates
• Excellent attention to detail, commitment to excellence, and outstanding work ethic
• Flexible and adaptable to changing environments; thrives in a bootstrapped culture
• Optimistic attitude, entrepreneurial spirit, curiosity to learn new things
• Ability to work on a variety of tasks at the same time, and keep track of a variety of workstreams 
• Sense of humor and enjoys a good pun

Note that relocation benefits may be available for applicants based outside of Rwanda. 

Women are encouraged to apply