Research Software Engineer

Sunlight reflection may be the only available option, alongside dramatic emissions reductions, adaptation, and rapid scaling of carbon removal, to rapidly limit many climate impacts over the coming decades. But we don't know nearly enough about it to make a scientifically-informed decision about potential deployment - and we're not on a trajectory for rapid, legitimate decision making.

Reflective is a philanthropically-funded initiative to develop the necessary knowledge base and do the requisite technology research and development, urgently and responsibly.

What you'll do

You will work across our full range of data infrastructure projects providing full-stack software support. In particular, you will ensure the code behind our multi-scale climate modeling project is reproducible, performant, and delightful for outside contributors. The purpose of this project is to prototype surrogate models, machine-learned emulators trained on targeted high-resolution simulations, designed to increase the accuracy and speed of modeling SAI deployment scenarios. From data ingestion to CI / CD and interactive docs, you will harden our codebase, orchestrate cloud / HPC workflows, and champion best-practice open-science engineering.

Responsibilities

• Build sharable datasets (Zarr / Cloud-Optimized NetCDF) and maintain data-catalog metadata.
• Create modular, CLI-first training and evaluation scripts; enforce style, testing, and limiting gates via GitHub Actions.
• Optimize I / O, parallelism, and memory usage on large, distributed compute clusters.
• Package models and dependencies as Docker / Conda environments and publish to DockerHub and PyPI.
• Lead documentation, example notebooks, and dev-container setups.
• Field community PRs and resolve bottlenecks / bugs.

Who you are

Minimum qualifications

Preferred qualifications

Not needed

We encourage anyone who is interested in this role to apply, regardless of whether you feel you meet 100% of the qualifications. The top candidates will bring their own unique perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds from a variety of industries along with many but not necessarily all the skills listed above. We offer professional learning and training opportunities to help you develop skills you may not have had the opportunity to cultivate yet.

Location

Our goal is to hire the right person for the role regardless of location, but we have a slight preference for candidates who can work from our Bay Area office 2-3 days / week. However, the role can be fully remote and we are open to candidates based anywhere in the world who can overlap with our core working hours. We may be able to sponsor visas for US-based foreign nationals and have a moving stipend to support candidates who would like to relocate to the Bay Area.

But regardless of location, we love seeing each other in person and believe regular co-location helps improve collaboration and team culture. As such, we plan regular team co-working weeks, typically in the Bay Area. This role may entail additional travel (up to 1x per month) for conferences, external meetings, and team gatherings. Of course, we cover those travel costs.

Compensation and Benefits

We are committed to providing competitive compensation and comprehensive benefits to our employees. We offer fixed salary levels based on experience and role to minimize biases in compensation and to ensure team members are paid the same for doing the same work.

We expect this position to be a regular, full-time position, with an annual salary between $130,000 and $190,000 USD, depending on level of experience. In addition to salary, we offer a comprehensive set of benefits to all full-time employees :

Diversity

At Reflective, recruiting, hiring, mentoring, and retaining a diverse workforce is critical to our success. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran.

Reflective is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.