At Yard Stick, we value climate impact above all else. We help farmers get paid to fight climate change.
Removing CO2 from the atmosphere will be necessary to avoid the worst effects of climate change. Among the possible methods for CO2 removal, sequestration in soils is widely seen as the most affordable and scalable, and comes with the valuable co-benefit of improving soil health. Farmers can readily sequester carbon in their soils by adopting practices such as cover cropping and no-till, known collectively as “regenerative agriculture”. However, current methods for actually measuring increases in soil carbon are prohibitively expensive and frankly medieval, requiring high costs to laboriously dig up soil cores and mail them to a lab for combustion analysis.
At Yard Stick, we’re inventing a new method of soil carbon measurement. We’ve packaged decades of soil science research into a handheld soil probe which measures soil carbon quickly and accurately, while reducing the cost of measurement by 90% over existing methods. Our probe combines a suite of cutting-edge sensors, a clever form factor, and advanced machine learning techniques.
In this role, you will lead development of our little carbon-measuring probe’s electronics and embedded software. You are responsible for making sure our devices operate reliably and intuitively, ensuring they collect high-quality data, and delivering that data to our data science team. You will work closely with our mechanical engineers, data scientists, and field teams who are using (and occasionally breaking) the device. You should be excited about having climate impact, working on small, creative teams, and getting hands-on with dirty hardware.
The Yard Stick soil probes are handheld electromechanical devices packed with over a dozen sensors and a spectrometer, used to capture soil data in unprecedented resolution. The prototype devices run Python code on an embedded raspberry pi, but you will evaluate and likely replace this architecture. The devices need to detect very small changes in soil properties, so sensor data fidelity and accuracy are paramount, as well as ensuring consistency across devices. The probes are deployed with our field specialists for weeks at a time, so reliability and remote management are critical.
Yard Stick deployed a few prototype devices with our field team in fall 2021, and a few dozen are planned for deployment in 2022. This role brings the opportunity to grow a project from prototype to a smoothly operating and maintainable machine. You will immediately be responsible for supporting and expanding the capabilities of in-field devices, monitoring and improving sensor data quality and calibrations, and working with the hardware team to design the next generation of devices. You will eventually need to manage production and deployment of a large number of devices.
Yard Stick is a remote-first company with cofounders in Oakland, Chicago, and Boston. But for our hardware team (including this job), in-person work together at our hardware lab is often necessary so we expect this role to be local to the SF bay area.