Software Engineer - Embedded / Full Stack
about 8 hours ago
Full time role
Hybrid · Oakland, CA, US
About The Role
Yard Stick is looking for an Embedded / Full Stack Software 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 high-precision optical instruments outfitted with numerous sensors, and we need you to help write software that collects, organizes, and interprets that sensor data! We are a remote-first company with a hardware team in Oakland, CA. You will collaborate with our multidisciplinary hardware team as well as our software and data science teams to build data pipelines, automated analytics, and robust fleet management and firmware.
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 quality of data we collect, which is why it is so important to build robust spectral calibrations and identify potential data quality issues right away.
Our team is still small and lean! This role will provide opportunities to work on a wide variety of projects, from writing software that runs directly on the probe, to automating our data quality checks and calibrations, and even hands-on 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 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 automate and harden our telemetry, sensor data, and calibration data collection processes and methods as we scale our hardware to higher volumes of production quality probes. Further software development includes improving spectral calibration calculations, algorithms to process and refine probe sensor data, and integrating new hardware features. This role will be critical in helping support Yard Stick as it scales its fleet and measurement coverage each season and advances its probe hardware!
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 a few times per week. This is a dream job for someone who loves collecting, processing, and interpreting data, interacting with hardware, and wants to join a rapidly-growing startup with literal planetary-scale impact. Travel to test sites up to 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 fromARPA-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, Extantia, Pillar VC, MCJ Collective… the list goes on!
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 aPBC, 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 inthis article which also specifically features Yard Stick.
Responsibilities
- Building tools to support field operations and hardware research and development efforts
- Developing software for and maintaining a fleet of devices
- Developing scripts and workflows to automate sensor data quality checks
- Designing experiments and analyzing sensor data to find the root cause when quality checks fail
- Suggest design changes that support increased sensor data accuracy and reliability
Qualifications (Must Have)
- Strong track record of delivering software that connects physical hardware and cloud infrastructure
- Strong proficiency in Python, which we use for firmware development, scripting, and data analysis
- Experience with embedded platforms such as Raspberry Pi, or similar hardware
- Experience working with sensors or sensor data
- Enthusiasm to learn, teach, and collaborate
- Passion for climate impact!
Qualifications (Nice to Have)
- Experience with jupyter notebooks, dataframes, data analysis, and plotting
- Experience with fleet management of physical devices
- Experience with Docker
- Experience working with cloud storage services such as S3
- Experience with SQL databases
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 asH.R.40 andS.300. We alsopublicly 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 likelabor 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 theGender 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.