What if nature could be harnessed to help farmers sustainably feed the planet? Since 2014, Indigo has questioned agriculture's full value chain to improve grower profitability, environmental sustainability, and consumer health. The company’s scientific discoveries and digital innovations have amplified new value from soil to sale, benefiting more than 10,000 growers to date. Indigo is also the company behind The Terraton Initiative, a global effort to drawdown one trillion tons of atmospheric carbon dioxide by unlocking the potential of agricultural soils. In 2019, Indigo was ranked #1 on CNBC’s Disruptor 50 list. Headquartered in Boston, MA, Indigo has additional offices in Memphis, TN; Research Triangle Park, NC; Sydney, Buenos Aires, Argentina; Basel, Switzerland; and São Paulo, Brazil. 

The Soil Carbon Science team, an interdisciplinary group of scientists at the heart of Indigo’s carbon credit program, is looking to hire a statistician to quantify the climate benefits of adopting regenerative land-management practices. Crucial to Indigo’s program is creating a scalable way to measure changes in soil carbon and trace gas emissions across vast landscapes. To identify causal effects, these emissions must also be estimated in a counterfactual world where growers did not change their practices. This statistician will research and implement statistical tools across the entire carbon crediting pipeline. Solving climate change with nature-based solutions poses statistical challenges, and the Carbon Credit Statistician will advance Indigo’s solution as well as the public methodologies used by carbon credit projects across the globe. 

Responsibilities:

• Research and implement the stratification of millions of acres based on characteristics of their environment and farming practices
• Contribute to forecasts of uncertainty and to recommendations of sample design
• Create tools to estimate the climate benefit using soil measurements, biogeochemical model predictions, and other datasets
• Develop the quantification of uncertainty arising from multiple sources (including measurement, model prediction, and sampling)
• Implement tools for handling missing data and for quality control
• Develop statistical models to assign climate benefit to small areas such as fields and farms (e.g., using multilevel regression and post-stratification)
• Contribute to writing monitoring reports submitted to carbon registries and to improving carbon methodologies

Competencies:

• Highly collaborative - ability to work across functions, enjoys working in interdisciplinary teams 
• Comfortable working with large datasets 
• Interested in and comfortable learning about other disciplines and domains (in this case, examples will include soil science and biogeochemistry) 
• Creative problem solver; when faced with incomplete data or an obstacle to interpretation, able to find ways to generate insights 
• Strong communication skills; able to communicate complex statistical concepts in simple language and with beautiful visualizations of data; able to communicate updates to leadership effectively; able to maintain clear and thorough documentation 
• Can prioritize effectively among multiple high-priority responsibilities  
• Comfortable with ambiguity and creating clarity in ambiguous situations 
• Able to complete all tasks, even menial ones, with a positive attitude 
• Passionate about the mission here at Indigo

Qualifications:

• 3+ years’ work experience with one or more of: survey statistics, environmental monitoring, Bayesian data analysis, spatial statistics, experimental design, or related areas of applied statistics required 
• MS/PhD in statistics or related discipline (e.g., social sciences, environmental sciences)
• Proficient in programming in SQL, Git, and either Python or R required (Indigo mostly uses Python) 
• Familiarity with carbon credit reporting and with developing sample designs for agriculture, forestry, and other land use is beneficial 
• Experience working with geospatial data is nice to have 
• This role is ideally based in Boston, MA (once our office moves back to normal working conditions post COVID-19), but permanently remote with occasional travel to Boston would also be considered

Indigo is committed to living our values, specifically “creating a work environment where everyone feels respected, connected, and has opportunities to learn and grow.” As part of living our values, we strive to create a diverse and inclusive work environment where everyone feels they can be themselves and has an equal opportunity of succeeding.