Data Science Intern, Farmless
Fermentation Modelling & Soft Sensors
1000 EUR a month
Carbon negative fermentation platform
Be an early applicant
Carbon negative fermentation platform
1-20 employees
Be an early applicant
1000 EUR a month
1-20 employees
Company mission
To free food production from animals and agricultural land.
Role
Who you are
- You model from first principles. The instinct we’re screening for is reaching for the process before the algorithm
- Statistics, properly. Uncertainty, priors, mixed effects, experimental design. You should be able to say what your model doesn’t know
- Python, scientifically. The numerical and statistical stack, not just the ML one
- You’ve met real data. Messy, small, expensive, gappy, with a sensor that was miscalibrated for three weeks in the middle
- You can talk to a process engineer. Explaining a result in terms of the process, to someone who knows the process better than you do, is half of this job
- Fast learner. Excited to dive into fermentation biology and bioprocess engineering
- Mission driven. Rewriting how the world makes protein genuinely excites you
- Bonus points for: bioprocess or chemical engineering, state estimation and control theory (Kalman filters and friends), Bayesian methods, time-series at scale, a biology, physics or systems biology background, enough software engineering to ship what you build, previous startup experience
What the job involves
- One central project, yours end to end. See three ideas below: which one you take depends on where you’re strongest and what the plant needs when you arrive, and we’ll work that out with you
- Build a soft sensor. Infer the unmeasurable from the measurable: biomass and product concentration, live, from off-gas, feed rate and the rest of the online signals. State estimation on a real process. The end state is the interesting part — a good estimate doesn’t stay in a notebook, it goes into BrewControl and closes the loop on a vessel in this building
- Model the organism. A kinetic model of our strain, fitted against our run history, that predicts what a fermentation will do before it runs. Mechanistic where the biology is understood, data-driven where it isn’t, and honest about which is which. The deliverable is a model the fermentation team trusts enough to plan against
- Design the next experiment. When a single run costs a fortnight, choosing the right one is worth more than any analysis of the last one. Design of experiments over the process parameters, with a model of the process as the surrogate, choosing sequentially as results come in. The deliverable is the run we do next
- The bar is the same whichever you take: someone bets a fermentation on it — a real run, planned differently because of what your model said
Our take
The climate crisis has heightened the urgency to develop alternative food sources, aiming to protect our planet and efficiently sustain the ever-growing global population. With a new approach to protein production, Farmless seeks to positively change the way we produce food for a better future.
The Dutch startup has developed the means to make a 'carbon negative' protein that requires between 10 and 25 times less agricultural land compared to conventional plant-based protein. Farmless makes its protein using a fermentation platform that utilises a liquid feedstock from renewable energy sources instead of sugar.
Founder Adnan Oner believes Farmless has the potential to end factory farming, revitalising our planet's ecosystem, and mitigating gigatons of carbon emissions. Although this is an ambitious claim, the company's substantial support from a number of investors so early on has propelled Farmless out of stealth mode and into the public eye, and highlights the potential it has to bring significant positive change to the agricultural industry.
Freddie
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (last 2 of 3 rounds)
Dec 2024
$1.2m
GRANT
Dec 2023
$5.6m
SEED
Total funding: $8.1m
Company benefits
- Free healthy vegan lunches, snacks and drinks
- Company provides you with a new macbook
Company HQ
Jodenbuurt, Amsterdam, Netherlands
Leadership
Adnan Oner
(Founder)Previously worked as the Head of Product at Tapfiliate and at 30MHz as a Hardware and Software Engineer.
Salary benchmarks
We don't have enough data yet to provide salary benchmarks for this role.
Submit your salary to help other candidates with crowdsourced salary estimates.
Share this job
View 1 more job at Farmless