hero

Find jobs at planet-healing startups

Search jobs at hundreds of venture-backed climate tech companies across the portfolios of dozens of leading climate VCs

Remote Sensing Scientist (Remote)

Pachama

Pachama

Remote
Posted on Thursday, February 1, 2024
The Role:
Pachama is looking for an experienced remote sensing scientist to advance research and development of our core remote sensing products. This individual would work on an interdisciplinary team of scientists and machine learning and software engineers. Pachama’s ongoing development of satellite-derived products for carbon credit issuance encompasses a range of sensors and research problems. However, our highest priority is mapping annual forest carbon stocks and change with optical, radar, and lidar observations. Future work may also include mapping time since disturbance, classification of land cover/use, and detection of tree features (e.g., crown detection/segmentation) in medium to high resolution optical imagery.
The primary areas of expertise we are seeking are preprocessing of optical and radar observations (e.g., atmospheric, BRDF, and terrain correction) and inter-sensor calibration to produce clean time series. We are seeking individuals with significant experience in this area who can define and execute a research agenda that improves the temporal fidelity of ingested satellite observations Pachama uses for quantifying forest carbon change.
Location:
This role is remote with a preference for being within 3 hours of Pacific time.
Who We Are:
Pachama harnesses AI and satellite data to empower companies to confidently invest in nature. Using the latest technological advances, Pachama delivers continuous insight into how forests sequester carbon, protect wildlife and benefit local communities. These insights enable leading companies to find the world’s best projects and track their impact over time while also helping land stewards earn an income with tools to develop carbon projects and secure funds.
Pachama has evaluated hundreds of nature-based carbon projects around the world and originated its own Pachama Originals projects across Brazil, Mexico and the United States, driving funding to protect and restore millions of hectares of land. The company has served climate leaders such as Salesforce, Nespresso, Shopify and Boston Consulting Group and is backed by investors including Lowercarbon Capital, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Future Positive, Amazon Climate Pledge Fund, Y Combinator and Deutsche Telekom.

What You Will Help Us With:

  • Improve pre-processing and compositing/gap-filling of Pachama’s existing satellite ingest (HLS Landsat & Sentinel 2, Sentinel 1, ALOS-Palsar).
  • LandSAT inter-calibration to integrate longer historical record in Pachama mapping
  • Evaluate new satellite observations for use in Pachama mapping
  • Time series analysis of input observations and output carbon maps (smoothing, break-point and trend detection)
  • Engage with Pachama software engineers to transition research to scalable code
  • Draft reports & manuscripts to communicate work to carbon market stakeholders and publish in opensource research archive or peer-reviewed publication.

Experience & Skills We're Looking For:

  • Significant research experience (5+ years): optical and radar preprocessing (e.g., atmospheric, BRDF, and terrain correction), inter-sensor calibration, and time series analysis
  • Experience processing optical (e.g., LandSAT, Sentinel 2, NAIP, Planet, etc.), radar (Sentinel 1, ALOS - PALSAR), and lidar (IceSat 1 & 2, GEDI) observations
  • Peer-reviewed publications and conference presentations
  • Experience processing large volumes of satellite data over distributed cluster.
  • Interest/experience working in non-academic setting (collaborating with software engineers and communicating with commercial & product-focused Pachama colleagues)
  • Interest/passion for applied work, forest conservation, and climate change solutions
Even if you don’t meet all these requirements, we encourage you to apply if this job description excites you. We are looking for ambitious people to help make an impact on climate change. That purpose requires us to bring together a diverse set of people with different backgrounds, perspectives, and skills to create solutions that work for all.