Senior Software Engineer - Remote

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.)

Enter Yard Stick. 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. Everyone talks about software eating the world; here, software just might save the world. For the right person, this is a rare opportunity to build a SaaS platform 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 understand our customers (growers, carbon credit developers) and our offerings. We’re in a complex space. Applying the principles of “Domain Driven Design” will serve you well.

The features you will build will span from integrating with 3rd party APIs to building customer dashboards, or from standing up a geospatial service through crafting email layouts. Our app is built with Ruby on Rails with a sprinkling of Stimulus written in Typescript, along with Tailwind CSS. These choices reflect an engineering ethos: the reason we’re writing software is to enable our customers to sequester carbon. We use proven tools to get there faster.

On the topic of speed: smartly scoping features is vital to our near and long term success. You will need to be savvy about tradeoffs, like when to deploy tech debt, when to refactor, or when to do it right the first time. Our software & hardware offerings have begun to find product/market fit. This has given a sense of real world urgency.

This is a full stack role. To coin a phrase: the smaller team, the fuller the stack. We’re well aware that no one can do everything, so if you lean more front- or backend that is a-okay, as long as you’re okay working outside your comfort zone.

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 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

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.

To Apply

Please send an email to evan@useyardstick.com. Include a line or two about why you’re interested in the role, as well as a brief anecdote about a feature you’re proud to have shipped. I promise I’ll respond ASAP.

Our Other Roles

Not the role for you? Check out our other openings!