About The Role
Yard Stick is looking for a Senior Hardware 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 the hardware team
onsite in Oakland, CA. You will work closely with our mechanical engineers and
software team, and periodically join our field team for in-field testing on
customer projects 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 1 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 writing software and
firmware on the probe and production integration of sensors and electrical
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
soil science 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.
We currently deploy a handful of our soil probes per season for projects
across tens of thousands of acres of agricultural lands. Our machine learning
models have shown unprecedented accuracy in predicting soil carbon content as
demonstrated by in-field tests, and are improving with every experiment. Our
priority is now on designing and building production units of the probes and
deploying them ASAP. Further hardware development aims at increasing the
variety of land we can access and improving the accuracy and efficiency of the
soil carbon measurement process, as well as making the probes able to take
collections faster. This role will be critical in continuing the transition of
our hardware from development to production-quality.
This role will report to Dalton Colen, Head of Hardware, and will be based out
of our Oakland, CA 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 wants to
join a rapidly-growing startup with literal planetary-scale impact. Travel to
test sites 1-2x 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.
We’d like to hire this person to start ASAP. The role is full-time.
About Yard Stick PBC
Yard Stick is a remote-first climate tech startup with cofounders based in
Boston, MA and Oakland, CA. 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
* Structuring, writing, and validating firmware/software that runs on the probe
* Organizing data validation investigations and experiments
* Contributing to spectral calibration and verification testing
* Debugging electrical and software issues (Including but not limited to spectral collections, other sensor data, ESD mitigation, RF interference, sensor data corruption)
* Developing new hardware features such as display, sensors, power management, etc.
* Supporting hardware deployment in field
* Contributing to robust and rugged systems to be deployed in harsh field conditions (e.g. 0-40C temperatures, Light rain, shocks and vibrations, dust, ESD/EMI)
Qualifications (Must Have)
* Proven experience shipping hardware that works
* Python, SQL, git version control literacy
* Data collection, processing, and interpretation
* Designing robust digital and analog schematics and layouts
* Competency evaluating electrical system performance
* Experience implementing and calibrating weird sensors
* Robust root cause analysis framework and skills
Qualifications (Nice To Have)
* Experience working with spectrometers or other high precision laboratory equipment
* Physics, Organic Chemistry, and/or Chemometrics background
* Instrument calibration process development
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.
