Senior Hardware Engineer

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.

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 the 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

Compensation and Other Details

- Market salary and equity commensurate with expertise. Directionally, we expect a salary in the range of $140,000 to $190,000.

- We offer health, dental, and vision insurance. We contribute 80% of base healthcare plan premiums and 50% of a base dental plan.

- We provide unlimited PTO, unlimited sick leave, and paid primary and secondary caregiver leave.

- Additional benefits include One Medical, Health Advocate, and Talkspace memberships and a company-sponsored 401k.

Our Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

Yard Stick’s impact goals go well beyond climate science. 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.

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.