Senior Mechanical Engineer, Yard Stick
$150-200k
+ Equity
More information about location
3+ days a week in office (Oakland, CA)
Developer of soil carbon measurement technology
Be an early applicant
Developer of soil carbon measurement technology
21-100 employees
Be an early applicant
$150-200k
+ Equity
More information about location
3+ days a week in office (Oakland, CA)
21-100 employees
Company mission
Yard Stick's mission is to help farmers have a positive impact on their climate by developing soil carbon measurement technologies.
Role
Who you are
- 6+ years creative mechanical design experience
- Advanced skill in 3D CAD and library management (e.g. Solidworks, NX, Onshape, etc.)
- Desire to mentor and guide other mechanical engineers in design and process
- Examples of owning a project from concept through system integration and production (including pilot-production or production of electromechanical systems in quantities >20 units)
- Familiarity with prototyping processes and manufacturing methods
- Strong understanding of common engineering fundamentals
- Passion for climate impact!
- Enthusiasm to learn, teach, and collaborate
Desirable
- Experience with mechanical design for optical systems, including fiber optics
- Experience with Python development: writing sensor data acquisition scripts, jupyter notebook data analysis, git version control
- Experience with mechanical design for thermal management and ingress protection
- Experience with basic electronics
- Experience designing and building calibration processes
What the job involves
- Lead the mechanical design, build, calibration, testing, shipment, and maintenance of probes
- Mature probe design, process, and support from quantity <10 to 20-50 probes
- Design and build calibration and test fixtures to assess accuracy and robustness of soil probes
- Work with soil science and machine learning teams to interpret data trends and inform future sensor design
- Work with field sampling and other technical teams to identify in-field soil sampling pain points and develop hardware solutions to improve process efficiency
- Document design, troubleshooting, and failure analysis of probe fleet as necessary
- Travel within US 1-2x per year to perform in-situ user testing of probes with field sampling team
- This role will report to Dylan Jackson, Yard Stick’s Head of Hardware, and will be based out of our Oakland hardware lab
- This role will provide opportunities to work on a wide variety of projects, from brainstorming and prototyping of sensors and mechanical 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 R&D 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 the requirements stage to implementation and data review with strong attention to detail and inter-team communication
Our take
Increased carbon regulations and awareness of the urgency of climate change mitigation have led many farmers to investigate soil carbon sequestration. However, achieving this requires carbon soil measurement, and this is a complicated process to achieve and is cost ineffective, stunting the acceleration of climate-positive agricultural practices.
Yard Stick develops soil carbon measurement technology, differentiating itself from existing solutions by reducing the cost of measurement by over 90%. The company achieves this by providing farmers with spectral hardware, allowing them to plan, measure and analyze measurement efforts with methods that are cost-effective, scalable, and simple to achieve.
Whilst augmented carbon soil sequestration technology already exists, Yard Stick has recognized that it is simply too expensive for most farmers to justify, despite their understanding of the importance of such methods. Whilst the company will face challenges from agricultural technology giants developing similar technology, it has shown great potential to facilitate soil carbon measurement and sequestration to scale and at low cost and has benefitted from substantial funding. This will help the company scale and aid more farmers in futureproofing operations whilst contributing positively to climate change mitigation.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Company
Funding (last 2 of 6 rounds)
Nov 2023
$1.4m
SERIES A
Aug 2023
$10.6m
SERIES A
Total funding: $31m
Company benefits
- Health, dental, and vision insurance via Justworks,
- Unlimited PTO
- Unlimited sick leave
- 6 weeks paid primary caregiver leave
- 4 weeks paid secondary caregiver leave
- We’ll buy you a computer and provide a work-from-home reimbursement to use how you please
- One Medical, Health Advocate, and Talkspace memberships
- A company-sponsored 401k via Slavic401k
- Remote-first
Articles
Leadership
Chris Tolles
(CEO)Experience as Innovation Advisory Council Member for Newton-Wellesley Hospital. CEO and Co-founder of Sundaily from 2017 to 2020.
Kevin Meissner
(Chief Engineer)Experience as Integration and Testing Lead for Capella Space. Co-founder and CTO of Charm Industrial from 2017 to 2020.
Salary benchmarks
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Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at Yard Stick
- 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 Decoder (this one is feminine-coded, fwiw). 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
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