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Data Scientist
YardstickUnited Statesfull_timeVerifiedPosted 25 Mar 2024
About the role
About the Role
Yard Stick is looking for a Data Scientist to help us fight climate change with soil. This role will coordinate with our hardware team to improve data collection from our novel spectral soil probe for building machine learning models, will partner with our soil science team to collect and analyze soil and geospatial data sets, and will collaborate with our business development team to accurately and effectively communicate soil carbon results to our customers.
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. You’ll collaborate across the company to combine that data with lab analyses and other data sources to build statistical and 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 technology team is distributed around the U.S. This role will report directly to Yard Stick’s VP of Software, and will work under the technical leadership of the Head of Data Science. This is a dream job for someone who loves working with data, is curious about soil science, and wants to join a 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 climate tech startup with cofounders based in Boston, MA and Oakland, CA. 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 70-90%, 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 awarded $18M across six USDA Climate-Smart Commodities projects, and we have additional grant financing from ARPA-E, NSF, CDFA, and other discerning grant-makers. We’ve also raised another nearly $18M from top climate VCs, including Toyota Climate Venture Fund, Lowercarbon Capital, Breakthrough Energy Ventures (Bill Gates’ climate fund), Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund, The Nature Conservancy, Extania, Pillar VC, MCJ Collective… the list goes on!
For more background, check out some coverage of Yard Stick in TechCrunch, Fast Company, and AgFunder.
We offer competitive salary and equity (benchmarked to 75th percentile of high-growth US tech compensation), health/dental/vision insurance, a 401k, and home-office reimbursements. We have many 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.
Yard Stick is looking for a Data Scientist to help us fight climate change with soil. This role will coordinate with our hardware team to improve data collection from our novel spectral soil probe for building machine learning models, will partner with our soil science team to collect and analyze soil and geospatial data sets, and will collaborate with our business development team to accurately and effectively communicate soil carbon results to our customers.
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. You’ll collaborate across the company to combine that data with lab analyses and other data sources to build statistical and 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 technology team is distributed around the U.S. This role will report directly to Yard Stick’s VP of Software, and will work under the technical leadership of the Head of Data Science. This is a dream job for someone who loves working with data, is curious about soil science, and wants to join a 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 climate tech startup with cofounders based in Boston, MA and Oakland, CA. 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 70-90%, 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 awarded $18M across six USDA Climate-Smart Commodities projects, and we have additional grant financing from ARPA-E, NSF, CDFA, and other discerning grant-makers. We’ve also raised another nearly $18M from top climate VCs, including Toyota Climate Venture Fund, Lowercarbon Capital, Breakthrough Energy Ventures (Bill Gates’ climate fund), Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund, The Nature Conservancy, Extania, Pillar VC, MCJ Collective… the list goes on!
For more background, check out some coverage of Yard Stick in TechCrunch, Fast Company, and AgFunder.
We offer competitive salary and equity (benchmarked to 75th percentile of high-growth US tech compensation), health/dental/vision insurance, a 401k, and home-office reimbursements. We have many 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
- Develop processes to transform, v
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