At Yard Stick, we help farmers get paid to fight climate change. We need a full-time or consulting chemometrician to help us accomplish our mission - is that you?
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.)
Enter Yard Stick. We’re developing a category-creating tool for the rapid, in situ measurement of soil carbon. Core to our offering is VisNIR spectroscopy and machine learning. Therefore, we’re looking to hire a chemometrician. This keystone role will span from consulting on optical design, through spectral analysis, up to the development of multivariate predictive models and/or machine learning. For the right person, this is a rare opportunity to bring a product to market with a hugely beneficial social impact. We’re venture-backed and ready to grow.
At Yard Stick, chemometrics is a cross-cutting concern. Your responsibilities will begin in consultation with the hardware team. We have custom-built optics and an off-the-shelf spectrometer built into a handheld soil probe. We operate in a variety of harsh conditions in the field, mostly on farms and ranches (hot afternoons in the summer, frosty mornings in late fall). We need advice on how to optimize both current and future generations of the hardware for spectral quality and consistency across devices.
We will rely on our chemometrician to test our assembled hardware, as well as to develop the ideal in-field usage. You will answer questions such as, How often should we take reference collections? What’s the best gain setting for our detector? What wavelength regions are most useful for identifying and quantifying signals, interferences, and reference? What spectral resolution is required for our models? These responsibilities will extend to characterization and acceptance testing for newly built equipment.
Finally, our reflectance spectra are only as good as the predictions they enable. You will be responsible for optimizing our spectral transformations and standardization across devices. You will work in tandem with our software engineers & data scientists to ensure that we are able to build models for accurately predicting soil organic carbon. A prior experience in soil science or biology is a big bonus, but not strictly required.
We’re open to both full-time and contract roles. We offer competitive salary, equity for permanent roles, health insurance reimbursements, a 401k, and home-office reimbursements.
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 details about our financing when we chat.
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 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 feminine-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 visit our application page.