Soil Scientist

about 2 months ago
Full time role
Remote · Oakland, CA, US... more
About The Role
Yard Stick is looking for a Soil Scientist with Pedometrics expertise to help us combat climate change with soil. You will ensure that high-quality proximal sensing principles are integrated across all Yard Stick functions, supporting our mission to replace lab analysis of soil carbon with in situ spectroscopy.  The ideal candidate is a soil scientist with experience in both soil spectroscopy and pedology with a combination of field work, lab work, and data processing methods.

On a typical day, our field team is out collecting data on farms, taking soil cores and spectral readings. This data is ingested by our data pipeline and transformed into carbon stock estimates through our evolving modeling architecture. You will provide the pedometric and soil science domain knowledge to advise our hardware team on building our spectroscopic soil probe, our software team on designing soil sampling projects, and our data science team on building robust carbon stock predictions from spectral data.

This is a dream job for a soil scientist with a background in proximal sensing and pedometrics who enjoys designing and running end-to-end soil spectroscopy experiments to push the boundaries of vis-NIR soil spectroscopy and SOC quantification.

Yard Stick is a remote-first company and the team is distributed around the U.S. If you want to be part of engaged and multidisciplinary research teams at a rapidly-growing startup with literal planetary-scale impact, you will thrive at Yard Stick.

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

About Yard Stick PBC
Yard Stick is a remote-first climate tech startup with a hardware lab in Oakland, CA and team members all over the US. 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 specifically features Yard Stick.


Responsibilities

  • Leverage soil domain knowledge to support Yard Stick’s spectroscopic hardware and modeling needs.
  • Design and run end-to-end in situ soil spectroscopy experiments to contribute to our novel spectral soil probe R&D in collaboration with Data Science and Hardware.
  • Enable SOC measurement and prediction leveraging spectroscopy informed pedometric techniques.
  • Assist with determining the suitability of new spectral probe projects based on soil data.
  • Assist with the development and refinement of methods and best practices for the measurement of SOC, IC, bulk density, etc., via conventional laboratory analyses.
  • Liaise with the customer success team to answer soils questions. Help build relationships with laboratories, industry, and academic partnerships.

Qualifications (Must Have)

  • Advanced degree or comparable expertise in soil science and pedology. Whether or not you have an MS or PhD, you have the expertise of one. You have a working understanding of how soils vary across a landscape, ecosystems, and farming systems.
  • Pedometrics and Proximal Sensing Expert. You have 2+ years of experience with pedometrics and proximal sensing with a focus in spectroscopy.
  • Stats and programming experience.  You are no stranger to statistical and modeling techniques (Linear Regression, Partial Least Squares, Random Forest, Neural Networks, etc.). You are competent in Python or R. You can wrangle, clean, and leverage R and/or Python ecosystem packages to visualize and analyze large datasets to drive insights.
  • Research & design foundation. You show demonstrated experience with experimental design. You are capable of creatively and collaboratively approaching novel problems.
  • Soils laboratory experience. Having spent at least 1+ year(s) in a soils laboratory; you have a strong framework for the fundamentals of soil laboratory methods.  
  • Ability to leverage geospatial data. Proficiency with geospatial data, mapping, pathing, and public sources of such data (SSURGO, GSSURGO, etc.) and command of tools (QGIS, geopandas, etc.) to manipulate such data.
  • Passion for climate impact and enthusiasm to learn, teach and collaborate!

Qualifications (Nice To Have)

  • Project Management Experience. You have experience spinning up and executing long term projects. You know how to coordinate with a team to see a project to completion
  • Ability to communicate Yard Stick’s scientific approach to multiple audiences. You have demonstrated experience presenting to audiences of diverse technical backgrounds.
  • Experience collaborating on publication strategy. Ability to take collaborative ownership of our publication strategy, working with our industry and academic partners to publish on themes relevant to Yard Stick’s spectroscopic probe research and design.

Our Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
Yard Stick’s impact goals go well beyond climate science. Why? Our company operates primarily in the US agricultural sector, which is predicated on centuries of mass land theft and disenfranchisement of Native and Black people. This harm continues today. If we’re going to work in this sector, we need to leave it better than we found it.

Consistent with our core value of “Pursue Justice,” we speak up about these issues, and we support emerging solutions and relevant policy efforts such as H.R.40 and S.300. We also publicly highlight the risk of further racial discrimination in emerging agricultural legislation like the Growing Climate Solutions Act and in press coverage ensure that the discrimination in past and present US agriculture is part of the conversation right alongside more typical topics like who our customers are, or how our tech works.

Regarding hiring and culture, we work to create a work environment where everyone feels confident sharing their ideas, problem-solving happens openly and collaboratively, and mistake-making is welcomed. We’ve recently organized lunchtime all-team discussions on issues like labor equity in Florida produce, Pigford v. Glickman (the largest US civil rights settlement in history), and other contemporary moral concerns in agriculture. When hiring, we standardize our interview process and questions to reduce “likeability” bias, benchmark salaries against industry databases to reduce negotiation, and utilize tools like the Gender Decoder. Climate change is arguably the most complex challenge ever faced by humanity - we need all of humanity activated to fight back, and that motivates us to build a diverse team.