Data Scientist & Engineer

Yard Stick is looking for a Data Scientist & Engineer to help us fight climate change with soil. This role will coordinate with our hardware team to build machine learning models using data from our novel spectral soil probe, and partner with our soil science and R&D team to collect and analyze soil and geospatial data sets.

On a typical day, our field team is out collecting data on farms. Raw data from spectrometers and other sensors get uploaded (once internet is available) and ingested by our data pipeline. Your job is to take this real-world messy data, process and normalize it, deal with partial collections and find inconsistencies. Next you’ll collaborate across the company to combine that data with lab analysis and other data sources to build machine learning models that estimate carbon stocks. Your work drives the incentives for climate-friendly agriculture.

Yard Stick is a remote-first company and the software team is distributed around the U.S. This role will report directly to Yard Stick’s VP of Software. This is a dream job for someone who loves working with data, is curious about soil science, and wants to join a rapidly-growing startup with literal planetary-scale impact.

We’d like to hire this person to start ASAP.

About Yard Stick PBC

Yard Stick is a remote-first, seed-stage company, with founders based in Boston and Oakland. We are on a mission to reverse climate change with agriculture. Scientists and farmers alike know that climate-friendly agricultural practices have the potential to remove atmospheric CO2 at gigaton/year scale. When these practices are adopted, more carbon is stored in soils, improving soil health and fighting climate change. But significant measurement challenges have held soil carbon efforts back - until now.

By reducing the cost of soil carbon measurement by 90%+, Yard Stick will dramatically expand the opportunities for evidence-based regenerative practices to simultaneously improve ecosystem health, increase farmer income, and combat climate change. 

Current soil carbon measurement technologies are slow, expensive, and cumbersome, relying on conventional soil cores and labs to quantify carbon stocks. In contrast, Yard Stick is fast and cheap - without sacrificing accuracy. As a testament to our technology’s potential, alongside our scientific collaborators, we were recently awarded $18M across six USDA Climate-Smart Commodities projects, and we have additional grant financing from ARPA-E, NSF, CDFA, and other discerning financiers. For more background, check out some recent coverage in AgFunder, TechCrunch or Treehugger.

We've also raised money from top climate VCs, including Breakthrough Energy Ventures (Bill Gates' climate fund), Lowercarbon Capital (Chris and Crystal Sacca's climate fund), MCJ Collective, and others. Details of the financing aren’t announced in a press release or article, because that can feel a bit cart before the horse, but we're happy to share more detail about our funding when we chat.

We offer competitive salary and equity, health/dental/vision insurance, a 401k, and home-office reimbursements. We have a number of founders and other team members with young families and have a strong track record of creative, flexible approaches to hours and communication expectations which let folks feel great about their commitments both to Yard Stick and their lives outside of work. We’re also a PBC, or public benefit corporation, which is an alternative corporate structure which protects our ability to prioritize climate impact over profits if the two are in conflict. You can read more about PBCs in this article which also features Yard Stick.

Responsibilities

- Coordinate with our hardware team to build new machine learning models using the data collected with our novel spectral soil probe
- Partner with our soil science group to collect, transform, and evaluate data about soil samples, soil organic carbon, and geospatial data
- Collaborate with our R&D team to experiment with novel ways of extracting actionable data from large soil data sets
- Implement and optimize data pipeline processes to transform, visualize, and analyze information from soil spectroscopy, lab results, plus geospatial and soil data sources
- Understand and apply various statistical models of soil properties
- Assist in building and operating the data infrastructure that underlies all this work
- Analyze and describe your results and findings to tell a story with data
- Work with the team to automate and scale these processes as Yard Stick grows

Qualifications

- 2+ years of relevant data science work experience
- Experience with data engineering and analytics in SQL, Python, pandas, sklearn, etc.
- Background in statistics and modeling techniques (Linear Regression, Partial Least Squares, Random Forest, Neural Networks (nice to have), etc.) 
- Ability to analyze and draw conclusions from modeling results
- Work experience producing professional, production quality software
- Passion for climate impact!
- Enthusiasm to learn, teach, and collaborate

Bonus Qualifications

- Experience with soil science, carbon modeling, and soil mapping
- Experience with spectroscopy or other signal processing techniques
- Experience with geospatial data, mapping, pathing, and public sources of such data
- Familiarity with AWS
$110,000 - $165,000 a year