Chief Data Scientist

Earthshot Labs’ is a science and technology company dedicated to planetary-scale land regeneration.

We conduct core ecological research and build technology products that inspire land stewards to restore their land, and easily onboard them to carbon marketplaces. We partner with world leading conservation and restoration organizations around the world to support them to develop, secure finance and certify their nature-based carbon project. Our just partnership model is centered on equitability, with a goal of driving as much money as possible back to the implementing organizations and communities on the ground. 

Earthshot is building two products that enable its vision: LandOS and Biome. LandOS is a platform for enabling landowners to envision and manifest the regeneration of land they have stewardship over and access carbon markets. Our intention is to build a product that inspires our customers to be bold, to delight and engage them while they envision the future possibilities of the land in ways never possible before. Biome is our Unity app that collects nature observations in the most accurate, fun and engaging way using the smartphone’s neural engine, camera, and augmented reality capabilities. The data collected is used to power both fundamental ecological research as well as to underpin our LandOS system for envisioning and manifesting land restoration.

Earthshot believes that people are most effective and happy when they bring their whole selves into their work, so they can unleash their full genius. We take shared breaths together, we discuss subjects that are deeply meaningful and at times vulnerable. We actively maintain a coherent field of deeply held love for nature and restoring humankind’s place within it. Despite our best intentions we are keenly aware of the potential problems inherent in creating a tech platform to engineer large scale land use, and so we are engaging with indigenous leaders, ecological experts, regenerative farmers, and other groups with deep knowledge of the land in order to ensure we have the highest integrity and wisdom infusing our efforts.

The Role: 

We're looking for an experienced senior technical leader for our science and machine learning efforts who has a unique combination of talents and experience. The essence of this role is to fully internalize Earthshot’s vision for heart-led planetary regeneration, formulate truly groundbreaking ways to apply machine learning models in order to realize this vision, and to attract, inspire and support a world-class technical team in order to build this technical vision. We seek someone who has deep knowledge of neural architectures and a range of experiences applying deep learning systems to solve challenging real world ecological problems. The ideal candidate would have a wealth of experience sourcing, onboarding, and feature engineering remote sensing geographical information sources, notably various forms of satellite and aerial imaging data. Thirdly our ideal candidate would have knowledge of and experience working with land surface simulation models applied to forest ecology and other relevant biomes and ecological processes. Our chief data scientist should have a combination of extensive academic and commercial experience, able to draw upon a strong support network and to attract world class technical talent from both realms. They should be equally versant in putting together state of the art research plans, and delivering enterprise quality software products. The Chief Data Scientist will oversee a fast growing team of machine learning engineers, remote sensing data specialists, forest ecologists, and other specialized technologists and thus should have excellent relational, communication and technical team leadership skills. This role will work directly with the founders of the company, most notably the CTO, in order to realize and expand upon Earthshot’s ambitious vision.

Requirements:

• 10 + years experience working with data and machine learning models, including and ideally focused on deep learning architectures. Academic research experience may count for a portion of this, in addition to industry software development experience.
• Experience applying deep learning architectures to real world problems; knowledge of different forms of ANN’s, experience with feature engineering, hyperparameter tuning, and other aspects of model development and refinement
• Comprehensive knowledge of remote sensing data sources and their application to ecological modeling. Ability to formulate hypotheses around these data sets and rapidly validate them.
• Experience with leading software development teams to deliver enterprise grade products, ideally applying deep learning to solving truly challenging problems
• Expertise in Python, R or other commonly used machine learning languages
• A deep love for nature and desire to help build a more integrated future for humanity within it

The most competitive candidates will have:

• PhD degree in a technical field (Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Applied Mathematics, Ecology or related technical discipline or equivalent experience) and / or a field related to terrestrial ecology (e.g. biology, ecology, geography)
• Experience with process-based models of the land surface, vegetation dynamics, or other geospatial systems

Skills you may have:

• Knowledge of species distribution modeling
• Experience with generative neural models for image generation
• Experience with deep learning tools e.g. Keras, TensorFlow, KubeFlow, or pytorch
• Experience with a range of large scale remote sensing data sets - visual, lidar, near infrared, microwave, etc
• Experience with GCP, AWS or Azure

Values:

The process is the product.

By now, you’ll probably have realized that Earthshot is a different type of organization than most other companies you’ve met. We’re inherently mission-driven for profound human and ecological impact. Even more important is the way we work together: the quality of communication, team coherence, creating conditions for the genius and creativity of our team members, recognizing the comprehensive lives that we each lead. Our vision for team culture is informed by teal management, a shared love of nature, and the cultivation of healthy human relationships. Earthshot is fundamentally motivated by love, and is an organization where heart-centered people can together apply their world-class talent to the biggest challenges of our time. We are a natively remote organization, which means that people can choose to work from home whenever they would like, and we have team gatherings every 1-3 months to build team coherence, foster deep relationships with each other, and enjoy nature together. In the future, we imagine permanent retreat places for teams to work for weeks or months at a time together in gorgeous natural settings.

Diversity: 

Earthshot is building a company that honors the awe-inspiring complex diversity of the whole earth. We prioritize hiring team members that expand our team’s representation of race, color, ancestry, religion, gender identity, national origin, sexual orientation, age, relationship style, and many other dimensions of diversity. We welcome introverts, weirdos, hippies, and anyone else with high emotional intelligence, passionate ecological commitment, and brilliant skills that maybe don’t fulfill the usual societal norms. This isn't just about inclusion or equity. We believe that the genius of diverse peoples and backgrounds is essential to create culture and technology that reflect the world we want to live in.

Details and Application:

Last but not least, we love to get to know our applicants better. Please take a 1 - 3 minute optional video about yourself, your genius, what you want to contribute to Earthshot, and what you want to receive in this next phase of your life and career.

Benefits and Perks:

Being on the Earthshot team offers a range of benefits including, a competitive salary, flexible PTO (and we truly encourage the team to take time away), 100% cost coverage for employees dental and vision, and 80% cost coverage for employees and dependents medical insurance. Eligible for all full-time US based employees. 

Earthshot Labs is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. We are committed to creating a diverse environment and is proud to be an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status.