Senior Sustainability Scientist

Why Finch:

Finch is a platform that decodes products’ environmental impacts to help consumers make better purchasing decisions. 

About This Role:

To achieve our ambitious goals, we are looking for a mission-driven Sustainability Scientist to join Finch’s founding team. The ideal candidate will be a versatile, resilient scientist with experience in academic research who is excited to translate the evidence base into actionable insights. Bring your scientific chops and innate curiosity and we’ll get you up to speed on consumer-facing software and startup life. It’s very exciting! In this role, you will be a key driver in helping achieve our company vision of making it easier for brands and consumers to live sustainably by leading our product strategy and managing technical execution. 

Who We’re Looking For:

We’re looking for an experienced, entrepreneurial environmental scientist to further develop and maintain our proprietary sustainability scoring algorithm. Our Finch Scores algorithm evaluates the environmental impact of millions of consumer products across six individual footprints– carbon, water, ecology, human health, raw materials, and waste. You’ll be the subject matter expert at Finch on the science of climate and the environmental impact of the products we score. 

• You are passionate about climate change and want your daily work to have a positive environmental impact. 
• You love being deep into the details, but never lose sight of the big picture. You can synthesize the need to know from a sea of information. 
• You are comfortable with GEFN (good enough for now), but always work toward improvement through iteration. 
• You are comfortable translating scientific data to non-science teammates and vice versa.
• You love reading scientific papers, keep up on the latest scientific research, have a robust understanding of where to find key information, and can use scientific research tools to quickly get the data you want and need. 
• You are able to manage and built out our sustainability team of interns and full-time hires. 
• You are clear about what you don’t know and are excited to empower teammates to develop knowledge and skills in ares
• You love learning new things and are excited to jump in, figure it out, anticipate, plan, and execute. 
• You are comfortable doing daily work independently as part of a cross functional, fully remote team. We have structured systems and touch points, but most of our days are solo work. 
• You are passionate about learning and growing but never afraid to ask questions, seek help, and be transparent about challenges. 
• You are resilient and enjoy the dynamic life of working at an early stage startup. 

The ideal candidate will:

• Have an advanced degree in physical, biological, or environmental sciences or engineering with a focus on the environment. Bonus points for experience with data science, specifically machine learning. 
• Have deep expertise in at least one of our footprint areas (carbon, water, ecology, human health, raw materials, and waste) and be able to rapidly get up to speed on the others. 
• Feel comfortable evaluating multiple academic sources and making a quick determination on inclusion in Finch systems. 
• Be exceptionally organized and detail oriented. Sources are cited, resources are tidy, and decisions are documented. 
• Exceptional written and verbal communication. You’re just as comfortable conveying complex information in academic papers as in emails, white papers, blogs, podcasts, and conversations with teammates. 
• Have experience with Life Cycle Analysis (LCAs) and the ability to quickly learn LCA softwares (such as GaBi, SimaPro, or OpenLCA). 
• Are a pro at managing and organizing multiple complex tasks simultaneously occurring across multiple projects. 
• Be excited to build a team around themselves as Finch grows! 

Please note that this is the ideal experience. If you’re not sure you have it all, please apply anyway! 

We are looking for someone within a 3 hour time difference from Eastern Standard Time. This role will be remote for the foreseeable future. 

If you want to learn more, please send a resume, your take on something climate related that you recently learned that knocked your socks off, and any other relevant information to hey@choosefinch.com with the subject: Senior Sustainability Scientist

Target salary range: $120,000

Finch is committed to creating a diverse and accepting environment. Moreover, we want a diverse group of people using our product and understand that those building our product need to look like those using it. We celebrate differences in gender, sexual orientation, race, ethnicity, education, ability, religious belief, geography, economic status and more because, together, these differences enable us to better solve problems. We welcome all qualified applications to apply.