Senior Scientist

almost 3 years ago
Full time role
United States · California, US · Mountain View, CA, US... more
United States · California, US · Mountain View, CA, US... more

Company

Kairos merges the Silicon Valley culture of innovation and business speed with deep knowledge of scientific instruments and aerospace technology. ...

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Job Description

About Kairos Aerospace 
At Kairos Aerospace, we combine innovative aerospace systems with advanced data science. Unlike traditional aerospace companies, we sell information, not hardware - we operate our sensors cost-effectively at continental scale to produce novel data streams about pressing global problems. First on our list: spotting hard-to-monitor emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas that accelerates climate change. Since starting continuous survey operations in 2018, Kairos has removed methane emissions equal to over 9.2 million tonnes of CO2e through our work. To put that in perspective, that’s equivalent to over 2 million cars being removed from the roads for a year or shutting down about seventeen 350 MW coal-fired power plants. We call that a good start. As a team, we love science and engineering, we love getting our hands dirty with hardware and software, and we love seeing our work make a difference in the real world. We’ve created a diverse, collaborative, supportive, and fun environment based on integrity and treating people right. So no matter your gender, gender identity, race, age, beliefs, sexual orientation, or disabilities, we welcome you and would like to work with you. :-) It’s never boring, it’s always challenging, and we’re usually laughing.
Senior Scientist  
The Senior Scientist position will advance the state of the art of Kairos’ primary data products. You will be responsible for owning and improving upon the data processing pipeline by which we translate our airborne spectroscopic imagery into actionable information for our customers.
You will work closely with the R&D and Hardware teams to evaluate what changes may translate into real data quality improvements. Your goal will be twofold: improve and increase the insights (including but not limited to methane retrievals) that can be generated from our rich datasets, and suggest and implement product improvements that will allow for better insights in the future. As part of this, you will help guide our decision-making by modeling or analyzing how proposed changes will impact future operations.
Finally, as our operations are rapidly growing, you will play a key role in growing our fleet of instruments, from streamlining our current processes and software, to generating automated processes for analyzing ever larger quantities of data.
(And, of course, Kairos is a startup and you’ll get to contribute to a lot of other interesting projects as well!)

Required

  • A well-qualified candidate will have most (but not necessarily all) of the following:
  • MA or PhD, or equivalent experience, in a data-heavy and process-driven field (e.g., optics, physics, atmospheric mechanics, remote sensing, ecology, chemistry)
  • Strong science analytics experience, including data modeling, scientific modeling, optimization, statistics, maximum likelihood and/or Bayesian estimators
  • Clean and strong programmer (python, bash, collaborative tools like github), with scientific and/or production-level coding experienceExperience with sensors, cameras, or imagery
  • Be a curious researcher, able to generate and test hypotheses as well as interpret the underlying functional drivers of data results, and comfortable with both independent and collaborative work

Desired

  • Machine learning experience
  • GIS skills
  • Work with hyperspectral or LiDAR data and/or instruments, or cameras more generally
  • Understanding of optics
  • Ability to travel for up to 1 week at a time
Life at Kairos
A few important facts about working at Kairos Aerospace: - We provide health, dental, and vision insurance, including subsidized coverage for dependents. Our 401K plan does matching based on the amount of methane we removed from the atmosphere in a given year. - We think death-march hours are a bad way to run a company. We expect something approximating a 40-hour workweek, but mostly we just care that your work gets done. No, really. (Full disclosure: we occasionally put in some extra hours during crunch periods, but that is the exception, not the norm). - We do not track vacation time, nor do we have set hours to be in the office. Instead, we encourage taking real vacations, mental health days, leaving early to pick up the kids, working from home, time-shifting commutes, staying home when you're sick, ducking out to the gym - we believe work time should be flexible. In this time of the Covid-19 pandemic, we have transitioned to 100% remote work aside from hardware and flight operations and plan to continue having remote positions in perpetuity. (We love it when kids make a cameo in a video call.)

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