Senior Data Engineer

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. 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.

A Bit More About the Role

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.

A Bit More About the Company

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.

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.

Our Commitment to Equitable Hiring + Culture

For a small company, walking the walk of equity and diversity starts with hiring: in sourcing, in evaluating candidates, and in making offers. Equitable hiring is a living process, and something we are actively working on.