Carbon Removal Scientist - Biomass Feedstock Accounting

Isometric is a carbon removal registry and science platform. Our mission is to avert climate disaster by ensuring the transition to carbon removal happens responsibly and fast.

We're growing quickly, but we’re intentional about hiring people who contribute to our unique culture. Our team is smart, meticulous and courageous—but warm, kind and supportive too.

We’re led by Eamon Jubbawy, an experienced CEO who previously co-founded Onfido—one of the fastest-growing enterprise technology companies Europe has ever seen—where he scaled the AI-based verification company from $1 million to $100 million in revenue in under six years.

The wider team is composed of scientists from universities including Oxford, Cambridge and MIT, as well as technologists from companies including Amazon, Shopify, Meta, Wise and Palantir.

And we’re backed by world-class investors with real-world experience in climate change and company building: Lowercarbon Capital and Plural.

Join us if you're ready to take on a career-defining role. Working here will be unlike any job you've had before.

Isometric is creating a framework we can apply across biomass feedstock types, which aims to allow us to take information about a particular projects' biomass supply chain and systematically evaluate whether we should discount the net carbon removal claims based on factors like counterfactual biomass uses or market leakage.

Outcomes you’ll be responsible for:

• Develop high level frameworks around land use effects, market leakage, counterfactual feedstock use and counterfactual carbon storage.

• Assess the informational requirements we would need from projects to satisfy the above considerations.

• Create feedstock specific frameworks, such as for forest thinning or agricultural residue, based on the feedstocks projects Isometric works with use.

• Ensuring that the science underlying the Isometric platform for BiCRS is internally consistent and in line with the latest research.

Tasks you might do

• Validate and/or develop protocols and verification frameworks applied to biomass feedstocks used for BiCRS projects.

• Proposing ways of determining when market mediated leakage is relevant and how this should be handled.

• Creating a framework for reassessing feedstock sources to account for changes in market structure, either external to any BiCRS project or as a response to their usage of a particular feedstock.

• Updating any existing frameworks Isometric uses to take into account new feedstocks being used by BiCRS companies.

• Collaborate with academics, national labs, and industry players on the latest in BiCRS feedstock research and consensus building.

• Evaluate BiCRS protocols to quantify net negativity, durability, and uncertainty.

Aptitudes you’ll display

• An interdisciplinary technical background in measurement and/or modelling techniques that you have applied or can apply to BiCRS processes, which you may have obtained through the process of earning a PhD degree or equivalent and through additional academic and/or industry experience.

• Eagerness to learn new things and to teach others about the science of carbon removal and storage. We are science-driven and are building technology that relies on the clear communication of science concepts, both internally and externally.

• Drive to urgently solve big challenges that have no obvious answers today. We’re doing novel things that no one person knows the answer to today.

What this role is not focused on

• Economic feasibility of biomass use: figuring out whether different feedstocks would be economical for BiCRS is an important problem but one that is less relevant to the process of verification and protocol creation.

• Biomass processing: The lifecycle of a BiCRS process involves feedstock sourcing, processing, and storage. We are currently not looking for expertise in the processing step. This would include research about the efficiency of biomass conversion or research on areas such as pyrolyser design.

This role might not be for you if

• You’re looking for a fully remote role at the moment. In the early stages of building our product we’re optimising for being physically together 3 days a week.

• You enjoy structure and only staying within your area of expertise. We’re a small team early on the journey and things change quickly as we learn more.

• You prefer a slower pace. While the problem we’re facing has a long time horizon, it’s also critical that we make meaningful progress on it today, not next quarter or year.