Terradot

Our mission is to accelerate gigaton-scale soil carbon sequestration around the world

Problem

Globally, soils have the potential to sequester over 1 billion tons of carbon through regenerative agriculture practices and emerging solutions like biochar and enhanced rock weathering. However today, measurement, reporting, and verification of soil carbon sequestration is not cost effective, accurate, or scalable. This prevents large-scale climate finance from being deployed to rapidly scale soil carbon improvement despite its massive potential to combat climate change, improve food security, and alleviate extreme poverty.

Company

Terradot is building technology to accelerate gigaton-scale soil carbon removal and storage around the world. To start, we are building the world's best global measurement, reporting, and verification (MRV) platform to accelerate high-integrity soil carbon sequestration. With Stanford’s Soil and Environmental Biogeochemistry Lab, we leverage technological innovation using ground truth sampling, remote sensing, and AI modeling to accurately and scalably measure soil carbon. For soil carbon project developers, Terradot decreases the time, cost, and complexity of MRV while increasing the integrity of the carbon removal credits for carbon buyers. This enables the large-scale deployment of climate finance to incentivize the adoption of sustainable practices. We are focused on improving soil health in emerging economies to maximize global sequestration and community impact.

We are a public-benefit corporation driven by passion and purpose in service to our planet, people, and prosperity. Terradot is backed by world-class investors including Floodgate, John Doerr, Kleiner Perkins, Sheryl Sandberg, Ponderosa Ventures, 776 Foundation (Alexis Ohanian), George Roberts, and Stanford’s TomKat Center for Sustainable Energy. We are advised by an all-star team of Stanford climate professors with 100,000+ citations collectively.

Values

• Curiosity: Most solutions to reach net zero do not exist yet. We are looking for sensationally curious team players who use a beginner’s mindset to find novel solutions and embrace the growth mindset to overcome setbacks
• Kindness: Great teams change the world, we believe kindness is the foundation to build great teams on and also guides the impact we aim to have on our planet to pay it forward.
• Mamba Mentality: Kobe Bryant’s Mamba Mentality combines love, passion, and borderline obsession to improve every day and create a culture of collectively becoming the best we can be at our shared dream.
• Speed and Scale: We value teammates who are ready to move at the speed and scale necessary to meet the urgency of the climate crisis. If you are looking to coast, stick to big tech.
• Multidisciplinary and Multicultural Collaboration: The ability to think across disciplines and work with people from a variety of backgrounds is not just a requirement, but a unique advantage given that our work spans multiple domains and impacts communities around the world.

About

We’re based in the SF/Bay Area and are fostering a strong in-person first, collaborative, mission-driven culture. Our founders graduated from Stanford with a focus on Climate Science and AI. They have previously founded and led an international nonprofit that has partnered with farmers to provide over 100 million meals to families in need and published AI+Remote Sensing for Climate Change research under Andrew Ng as part of the Stanford ML Group.

Founding AI+Remote Sensing Engineer

Role Description

• You will lead our AI+Remote Sensing efforts to support on our core measurement technology: e.g. applying cutting-edge deep learning models on remotely sensed imagery to verify if a sustainable practice is being adopted by farmers on the field
• You will work directly with the founders and have the opportunity to own our AI+Remote Sensing Stack and make product and infrastructure decisions in addition to directly leading AI+Remote Sensing work

Requirements

• PhD or Master’s level or equivalent experience in Computer Science and/or Remote Sensing
• Experience working with Remote Sensing Data e.g. Landsat, Sentinel-2, and GIS Tools e.g. Google Earth Engine, GDAL, Rasterio
• Demonstrated ability to apply remote sensing imagery and AI to large-scale monitoring and/or modeling e.g. in natural ecosystems, agriculture, and/or wildland and urban environments
• Proficiency in scientific computing with Python and experience using deep learning frameworks such as Pytorch/Tensorflow, with the ability to quickly pick up new technical skills
• Experience with cloud-based (AWS/Azure/GCP) implementation of software
• Experience in team software development practices and tools, e.g. Agile Development, GitHub, etc.
• Quick learner and able to read research papers across disciplines and translate cutting-edge research into action
• Strong communicator with an ability to present technical work to various audiences, including government leaders and local communities, and collaborate across disciplines
• You are a proactive problem-solver and have strong attention to detail

Nice to Haves

• Experience working in the agricultural setting using AI and Remote Sensing as evidenced by employment/research/projects
• You care deeply about climate change and feel a strong moral responsibility to act now. This extends into all facets of your life: both personal and professional. No action is too small and no goal too big. Whether you have turned vegan or swear by public transport, we are big believers in embracing sustainability as a mindset and would love to learn what this means for you!

What does success in this role look like?

• You are able to train and productionize AI models to support our core measurement technology
• You are able to leverage your understanding of both AI and Remote Sensing advances to improve upon the current state-of-the-art