Senior/Lead Data Scientist

After the launch of our MVP of the BeZero Carbon Markets (BCM) platform late last year, we are now scaling our data engineering and science team at pace. The team will be a small group of engineers and scientists that build the core data products and automation for our client-facing platform and therefore sits at the core of the business. Your work would cover a broad range of applications: you could be developing statistical and machine learning algorithms that automate (parts of) our offset rating methodology further, use Markowitz-style portfolio optimisation techniques to build portfolios of carbon offsets, or build neural networks to process satellite imagery data to enable offset tracking over time, to name just a few potential applications.

As a data team, we have a bias towards shipping products, staying close to our internal and external customers, and owning our deployments end-to-end. We avoid silo-ed teams where proof-of-concepts are built separately and handed over to software engineering teams before they are considered production-ready. Our philosophy is to follow software engineering best-practices when developing our data products (for example, see this repo by Satalia that details a similar development workflow for data products). The tech stack is AWS-based and uses SQL (PostGres) and Python’s ecosystem for data engineering and science (think packages like NumPy, Pandas, Airflow, FastAPI, etc). While these foundations have been set, we are still early in our journey with many things we want to build. As an early team member, you will have significant opportunity to help shape the team’s products and the way we build them.

You’re welcome to work in our London-based office, but very much welcome applications remotely if you can work GMT +/- 3 hours. You’d be reporting into our Chief Data Strategist Thomas, who joined recently from data and machine learning consultancy QuantumBlack and McKinsey & Co, and represents the data organisation at the executive level.

Responsibilities:

You will be an individual contributor in our central data team, focused on scoping and building data products to be deployed on our carbon markets platform that helps clients make smarter Net Zero decisions.

You will research and implement statistical and machine learning approaches to solve business challenges relevant to carbon markets (e.g., think carbon offset rating algorithms, credit issuance time series forecasting, text mining on carbon removal project documentation to name a few use-cases).

You will work in a collaborative, production-facing codebase that is closely coupled with engineering systems.

You will be involved in the day-to-day operations of the team, including maintaining and improving our current tools & scripts and collaborating with experienced data engineers.

You’ll be our ideal candidate if:

You care deeply about the climate and carbon markets and are excited by solutions for decarbonising our economy.

You have an advanced degree in a quantitative field.

You have 4+ years of experience in scoping and building statistical or machine learning use cases in production.

You have practical knowledge of software engineering concepts and best practices, inc. DevOps, DataOps, and MLOps.

You are familiar with SQL and the Python scientific computing stack (NumPy, SciPy, matplotlib, pandas, etc) (must-have) and workflow orchestration tools (e.g., Prefect, Dagster, Airflow), containerization (e.g., Docker), cloud platforms (we use AWS but experience with any cloud platform will do) (preferred).

You are able to write clean, maintainable, scalable, and robust code in Python and SQL, and familiar with collaborative coding best practices (e.g. PEP8 code style, unit testing, continuous integration tools such as flake8, black, isort, etc).

You are a highly collaborative individual who wants to solve problems that drive business value. You have a strong sense of ownership and enjoy hands-on technical work.

You are comfortable when faced with a lot of ambiguity, both technically and organisationally. You’re happy to tackle problems without a clear definition or solution.

You enjoy owning problems end to end, from the early exploration of the problem through to releasing things to customers and understand that often doesn’t involve writing code.

Bonus points (but we’d still like to hear from you if you don’t have experience in any of these)

Experience working with PDF and text data (natural language processing) is a plus.

Experience in working with satellite imagery data is a plus.

Experience in productionising deep learning models for text or image processing is a plus.

Experience working with geospatial data in Python (geopandas, xarray, rasterio, etc) is a plus.

Research has shown that women are less likely than men to apply for a role if they don’t have experience in 100% of the requirements outlined in a job description. Please know that even if you don’t have experience in all the areas above but think you could do a great job and are excited about shaping company culture, finding great people, and building great teams, we’d love to hear from you!

What we’ll offer:

• Competitive renumeration and opportunity for equity in a rapidly growing VC-backed start-up through share options
• Ability to learn and develop alongside a range of sector specialists from the scientific, technology, economic and business community
• Opportunity to be part of a fast-growing data organisation that is central to the company, with clear opportunities to set the pace and vision for the team and to either develop in the future as an IC, into a deep tech expert in carbon markets, or as an engineering manager, leading the day-to-day of the team.
• Flexible working arrangements: A central London office space (Angel) if you wish to work from an office, but opportunity to work completely remote as well.

Our interview process:

• Initial screening interview (15-30 mins)
• Technical experience interview (45 mins) and case study (45 mins) with Chief Data Strategist
• Final interview (1hr) with senior management
• Reference checks + offer

We value diversity at BeZero Carbon. We need a team that brings different perspectives and backgrounds together to build the tools needed to make the voluntary carbon market transparent. We’re therefore committed to not discriminate based on race, religion, colour, national origin, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital status, veteran status, age, or disability