At Yard Stick, we help farmers get paid to fight climate change. We do so with a category-creating tool for measuring the amount of carbon that is sequestered in soil.
You may have heard of “regenerative agriculture.” This is a collection of farming and ranching practices (such as no-till or crop rotation) with enormous potential to improve soil health, while pulling carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. However, it is difficult to measure the impact of these practices. Current methods are slow, expensive, and cumbersome. (Think slide-hammer + mailing soil across the country.)
We believe that accurate, affordable, and fast carbon measurements will fundamentally change both the economics and the legitimacy of agriculture-backed carbon credits. Done right, this will put an entire industry to work in the service of the environment. As one might imagine, this involves the coordination of large amounts of data, often from disparate sources. Therefore, we’re hiring our first data engineer. For the right person, this is a rare opportunity to build a data stack from the ground up. We’re venture-backed and ready to grow.
Your first task at Yard Stick will be to build out a system to transform the data coming from our hardware into a format conducive to machine learning. Some of these transformations will be provided by our hardware team. Others you’ll have to discover yourself. Moreover, this will likely require supplemental data from external sources, such as the MLRA soil survey. Our current data stack is Python on AWS, with pandas, NumPy, likely PySpark, and whatever tools you deem appropriate.
On this and other tasks, your collaborators will range from data scientists to software engineers to our colleagues at the Soil Health Institute. This means you will need to balance the pragmatism of a seed-phase startup looking to ship code, with the thoughtful, deliberate ruminations of academia. We need to get this right; we need to build a company. Climate change is an urgent problem.
As our first data engineer, we will trust you to pick the right tools, and to design a right-sized system for our current level of institutional maturity. (Or in other words, please let’s not use Airflow.) You won’t be working alone: the three current members of the software team are excited to roll up their sleeves and help out with data. However, we will rely on your experience. Likely that means you should have several years (or more) experience using Python to get data in and out of both databases and applications.
Yard Stick is a remote-first, seed-phase company, with founders based in Boston, Oakland, and Chicago. Alongside our scientific collaborators, we were recently awarded a $3.6M grant from the DOE ARPA-E Smartfarm program. For more background, check out some recent coverage in TechCrunch or Treehugger.
We've also raised money from top climate VCs, including Breakthrough Energy Ventures (Bill Gates' climate fund), Lowercarbon Capital (Chris and Crystal Sacca's climate fund), MCJ Collective, and others. It's not announced, because that can feel a bit cart before the horse, but we're happy to share more detail about our financing when we chat.
On a personal note: before co-founding Yard Stick, I (Evan, head of software) spent almost two years trying to answer the question, “How can my experience in delivering SaaS products be applied to the climate crisis?” Here is where I finally found my answer.
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 and be able to sleep at night, we need to actively work to make it better.
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.
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 also standardize our interview process and questions to reduce “likeability” bias, benchmark salaries against industry databases to reduce negotiation bias, and utilize tools like the Gender Decoder (this one is neutral-coded, fwiw). 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.
Please send an email to [email protected] Include a line or two about why you’re interested in the role, as well as a brief anecdote about a gnarly data problem you’ve encountered in the past. I promise we’ll respond ASAP.