Senior Mechanical Engineer
about 8 hours ago
Full time role
Hybrid · Oakland, CA, US
About The Role
Yard Stick is looking for a Senior Mechanical Engineer to help us combat climate change with soil.
Yard Stick designs and builds soil probes to measure carbon sequestration in cropping and grazing lands. Our probes are both high-precision optical instruments and ruggedized field tools, and we need you to help us design, build, and test them! We are a remote-first company with a hardware team in Oakland, CA. You will work closely with our data science team, and periodically join our field team for in-field testing across the United States!
Our custom soil carbon probes are designed and built in-house. Our probes consist primarily of a ruggedized spectrometer and optical system which can penetrate up to 0.5 meter into the ground to collect data about the soil. That data is then uploaded to our cloud infrastructure where machine learning models translate it into soil carbon measurements. Our carbon estimates are only as good as the data we collect, so it is of utmost importance that our probes remain accurate and reliable throughout long sampling days in extreme field conditions!
Our hardware team is still small and lean! This role will provide opportunities to work on a wide variety of projects, from brainstorming and prototyping of sensors and mechanical systems, to test fixture and calibration process design, to hands-on building and field testing of our hardware. You will be working with field, data, and R&D teams as well as our software, electrical, and mechanical engineers on the hardware team to accomplish these tasks. The ideal candidate will be able to own projects from the requirements stage to implementation and data review with strong attention to detail and inter-team communication.
Today we build and ship a handful of our soil probes each season and test them across thousands of acres of agricultural lands with our field team. Our machine learning models have shown high accuracy in predicting soil carbon content with the probes as demonstrated by in-field tests throughout this year. Your main goal will be to help scale the current hardware into larger quantities of production quality units of the probes and deploy them ASAP. Further parallel hardware development aims at increasing the variety of land we can access and improving the accuracy and efficiency of the soil carbon measurement process. This role will be critical in completing the transition of our hardware from development to production-quality and enabling soil carbon at scale!
This role will report to Dylan Jackson, Yard Stick’s Head of Hardware, and will be based out of our Oakland hardware lab. Yard Stick is a remote-first company but this role will be required to work in-person with our hardware team at least three days a week. This is a dream job for someone who loves working hands-on with hardware, collecting and analyzing data, designing experiments and test fixtures and wants to join a rapidly-growing startup with literal planetary-scale impact. Travel to test sites ~2x per year is encouraged to see the sampling process with the field team and ensure hardware runs smoothly.
Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer in the U.S. Unfortunately we are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment Visa at this time.
About Yard Stick PBC
Yard Stick is a remote-first climate tech startup with a hardware lab in Oakland, CA and team members all over the US. We are on a mission to reverse climate change with agriculture. Scientists and farmers alike know that climate-friendly agricultural practices have the potential to remove atmospheric CO2 at gigaton/year scale. When these practices are adopted, more carbon is stored in soils, improving soil health and fighting climate change. But significant measurement challenges have held soil carbon efforts back - until now.
By reducing the cost of soil carbon measurement by 70-90%, Yard Stick will dramatically expand the opportunities for evidence-based regenerative practices to simultaneously improve ecosystem health, increase farmer income, and combat climate change.
Current soil carbon measurement technologies are slow, expensive, and cumbersome, relying on conventional soil cores and labs to quantify carbon stocks. In contrast, Yard Stick is fast and cheap - without sacrificing accuracy. As a testament to our technology’s potential, alongside our scientific collaborators, we were awarded $18M across six USDA Climate-Smart Commodities projects, and we have additional grant financing from ARPA-E, NSF, CDFA, and other discerning grant-makers. We’ve also raised another nearly $18M from top climate VCs, including Toyota Climate Venture Fund, Lowercarbon Capital, Breakthrough Energy Ventures (Bill Gates’ climate fund), Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund, The Nature Conservancy, Extania, Pillar VC, MCJ Collective… the list goes on!
For more background, check out some coverage of Yard Stick in TechCrunch, Fast Company, and AgFunder.
We offer competitive salary and equity (benchmarked to 75th percentile of high-growth US tech compensation), health/dental/vision insurance, a 401k, and home-office reimbursements. We have many team members with young families and have a strong track record of creative, flexible approaches to hours and communication expectations which let folks feel great about their commitments both to Yard Stick and their lives outside of work.
We’re also a PBC, or public benefit corporation, which is an alternative corporate structure which protects our ability to prioritize climate impact over profits if the two are in conflict. You can read more about PBCs in this article which also specifically features Yard Stick.
Responsibilities
- Lead the mechanical design, build, calibration, testing, shipment, and maintenance of probes.
- Mature probe design, process, and support from quantity <10 to 20-50 probes
- Design and build calibration and test fixtures to assess accuracy and robustness of soil probes.
- Work with soil science and machine learning teams to interpret data trends and inform future sensor design.
- Work with field sampling and other technical teams to identify in-field soil sampling pain points and develop hardware solutions to improve process efficiency.
- Document design, troubleshooting, and failure analysis of probe fleet as necessary.
- Travel within US 1-2x per year to perform in-situ user testing of probes with field sampling team.
Qualifications (Must Have)
- 6+ years creative mechanical design experience.
- Advanced skill in 3D CAD and library management (e.g. Solidworks, NX, Onshape, etc.).
- Desire to mentor and guide other mechanical engineers in design and process.
- Examples of owning a project from concept through system integration and production (including pilot-production or production of electromechanical systems in quantities >20 units)
- Familiarity with prototyping processes and manufacturing methods.
- Strong understanding of common engineering fundamentals.
- Passion for climate impact!
- Enthusiasm to learn, teach, and collaborate.
Qualifications (Nice To Have)
- Experience with mechanical design for optical systems, including fiber optics
- Experience with Python development: writing sensor data acquisition scripts, jupyter notebook data analysis, git version control
- Experience with mechanical design for thermal management and ingress protection
- Experience with basic electronics
- Experience designing and building calibration processes
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, we need to leave it better than we found it.
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 and in press coverage ensure that the discrimination in past and present US agriculture is part of the conversation right alongside more typical topics like who our customers are, or how our tech works.
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’ve recently organized lunchtime all-team discussions on issues like labor equity in Florida produce, Pigford v. Glickman (the largest US civil rights settlement in history), and other contemporary moral concerns in agriculture. When hiring, we standardize our interview process and questions to reduce “likeability” bias, benchmark salaries against industry databases to reduce negotiation, and utilize tools like the Gender Decoder. 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.