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.