About us

Groundwork BioAg develops mycorrhizal inoculants that help farmers build and preserve soil organic carbon. Through the Rootella Carbon Program, we generate verified soil-carbon credits under Verra's VCS program (VM0042), reviewed by independent rating agencies and verifiers. The credibility of every credit rests on rigorous science, and we're looking for a senior statistician to strengthen it.

The role

This is a long-term, part-time advisory role averaging about 10 hours a week. It gets heavier around sampling seasons and verification cycles and lighter in between. You'll be the senior sounding board for our data science team on major statistical and modeling decisions. Our focus is applied mathematics and statistics, not ML engineering.

What you'll do

• Review statistical and data-science approaches before the team commits to them
• Advise on the models behind soil-carbon quantification, including our process-based soil–plant–mycorrhiza model (calibration, validation and uncertainty)
• Guide Monte Carlo design and uncertainty quantification, including the uncertainty deductions applied to credit issuance
• Advise on soil sampling plans, control-plot design and responses to verifier findings
• Help define QA/QC procedures for field, lab and remote-sensing data
• Support the team in technical discussions with rating agencies, verifiers and modeling partners

What you bring

• Ph.D. in statistics, applied mathematics or a quantitative science with a strong statistical component
• 10+ years of hands-on experience applying statistics and mathematical modeling to physically measured, real-world data
• Strong foundations in probability, inferential statistics, linear algebra and optimization
• Proven experience with Monte Carlo simulation and uncertainty quantification
• Experience designing sampling schemes and experiments (stratified sampling, control/treatment designs)
• Proficiency in R and/or Python for statistical computing
• Ability to defend methodology to external reviewers, auditors or regulators
• Excellent written and spoken English

Advantages

• Background in soil science, soil carbon or agronomy (or else biology, physics or chemistry)
• Experience calibrating and validating process-based models, or working with spatial and remote-sensing data
• Familiarity with carbon markets and MRV (Verra VM0042, insetting, Scope 3 / SBTi FLAG)
• Prior work with rating agencies, verification bodies or scientific peer review

Deep learning, LLMs and MLOps are not required.

Engagement: long-term, consultant or part-time contract · Start ASAP · Occasional calls across US, Brazil and European time zones

To apply: send your CV and a short note describing a project where you built a statistical or simulation model for real-world measured data and defended it to an external reviewer.