Senior Software Engineer Web Applications

About The Role

Yard Stick is looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help us combat climate change with soil. We use spectral imaging and machine learning to measure organic soil carbon, bringing down the cost of soil measurement and creating incentives for better soil management and carbon sequestration.

We are looking for someone who is excited to be part of our mission and part of our small team, working on a wide variety of projects both for our customers and our various internal teams. Most of our work is Python (for the data processing end of things) and Ruby (for the web front end), and we’re looking for someone who is expert in at least one of those stacks (and willing to work in the other).

This role is on our software team, reporting directly to the VP of software, and would work in close coordination with our product teams (data science, hardware, soil science) and our sales, business development, and field teams. This is a full-time, remote position, and we are looking to hire as soon as possible.

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 SF/NYC), health/dental/vision insurance, a 401k, and home-office reimbursements. We have a number of founders and other 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 features Yard Stick.

• Work with customers and our business development team to extend our customer portal and API
• Improve our geospatial project management and planning tools, building sampling plans, visualizing GIS data, and developing new data services as needed
• Develop and enhance internal tools for data review and quality control on collected and analyzed soil data
• Develop and improve our data pipeline, machine learning tools, model management, and anything to help our data science team work more efficiently

• 3+ years of relevant work experience
• Expertise in web application development, either with a standard Ruby+Rails or Python environment, plus willingness to work in both stacks (since we use both)
• Work experience producing professional, production quality software
• Passion for climate impact

• Experience with both of the Ruby and Python stacks mentioned above
• Experience with data analysis using Jupyter notebooks or similar
• Ability to design and implement great customer experiences
• Experience with productionized data processing pipelines
• Knowledge of GIS data, mapping, pathing, etc.
• Familiarity with AWS
• Experience processing data from hardware sensors

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.

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, 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.