Posted 
May 20

Executive Software Leadership (Remote)

Operations
REMOTE

Role Description

Hey there!
We'll likely be hiring for an executive-level software leader in the near future. We're still working on specifics, but if you're a VP Eng- or CTO-type passionate about climate impact, we'd love to hear from you. This role can be 100% remote within US continental time zones.

We're particularly interested in folks with experience in any of the following technologies:

  • maps and mapping
  • geospatial statistics/datasets
  • ag/soil
  • spectroscopy/chemometrics
  • IoT/sensors
  • MRV
  • markets/transactions
  • alignment to 3rd party standards
  • field apps (data coming from “out there” IRL)

About Yard Stick PBC

Yard Stick is a remote-first, seed-stage company, with founders based in Boston, Oakland, and Chicago. 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 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. Alongside our scientific collaborators, we were awarded a $3.6M grant from the DOE ARPA-E Smartfarm program in Fall 2020. For more background, check out some recent coverage in TechCrunch or Treehugger.
We've also raised money from top climate VCs, including Breakthrough Energy Ventures (Bill Gates' climate fund), Lowercarbon Capital (Chris and Crystal Sacca's climate fund), MCJ Collective, and others. This financing isn’t announced, because that can feel a bit cart before the horse, but we're happy to share more detail about our fundraising when we chat.

We offer competitive salary, equity for permanent roles, health insurance, a 401k, and home-office reimbursements. In terms of flexible schedules, 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 family.

Our Commitment to Equitable Hiring + Culture

Yard Stick’s impact goals go well beyond climate science (although our #1 value is Climate Impact). 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 actively work to make it better.

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 Decode. 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.

Yard Stick
 at a glance

Soil carbon sequestration efforts to date have been significantly hampered by the complexity and cost of measuring SOC authoritatively and affordably. Yard Stick's mission is to fix that problem. By reducing the cost of statistically-significant and agronomically-legitimate SOC measurement by 90%+, we can dramatically expand the opportunities for evidence-based regenerative practices to simultaneously improve ecosystem health, increase farmer/rancher livelihoods, and combat climate change.