About Vibrant Planet:

We are a team of leaders in science, forestry, climate policy, and tech. Vibrant Planet is building a data-driven land management platform, with an initial focus on increasing the pace and scale of forest restoration. Quality forest management in the Western US reduces catastrophic wildfire and tree mortality, improves air quality and water quality and quantity, provides critical habitat, and builds rural economies.

Vibrant Planet is backed by climate and ecosystem resilience solutions leaders, including Grantham Foundation, Earthshot, Elemental Excelerator, Ecosystem Integrity Fund, Chris Cox CPO of Meta), Neil Hunt (ex CPO of Netflix), Cisco, Valia Ventures, and Halogen Ventures.

For further information please visit: VibrantPlanet.net

About the Role:

Vibrant Planet seeks a Product Manager to partner with our computer vision, forest ecology data science, and data engineering teams to produce validated vegetation structure data, ecological and hydrological datasets, climate-modified risk models, and more to support land management planning, monitoring, forecasting, and translational land management research.

Responsibilities:

• Own the data and machine learning roadmap, including close coordination with the application product manager(s)
• Understand use cases deeply, and effectively portray these to engineers; includes identifying needs for and driving user research activities
• Prioritize and trade off accuracy, scalability, cost, and utility, understanding nuances of machine learning approaches; define best practices for model lifecycles
• Manage the boundaries between scientists and engineers, distilling and resolving disconnects, and facilitating effective discussions
• Define, solicit, and improve model validation strategies
• “Dogfood” – use and test data from multiple customer points of view, and coordinate broader dogfooding activities
• Provide input to and assist in mediating decisions around infrastructure and architecture
• Provide project management oversight for excellent execution: this may include developing meeting agendas, running sprint planning meetings, and conducting retrospectives and pre-mortems.
• Act as the point of contact for the Vibrant Planet Data Commons (nonprofit)
• Communicate team accomplishments, progress, and risks to leadership and to the company at large
• Support fund raising activities, for example grant applications and investor material preparations
• Provide material input to data related company strategy, eg around development opportunities and data sharing
• Support organizational and budget planning
• Support sales and marketing activities as appropriate

Experience and Background :

• 3 years of experience in data/ml product management, shipping ML models to production. Alternatively, leadership experience in a data/ML related technical role, working with engineers and with significant customer facing experience.
• Experience and ability to code in at least one language such as R, Python, SQL (less preferred). Comfortable working in a notebook environment such as Jupyter.
• Desirable: 1 years of experience with geospatial data.
• Desirable: education in or experience with life or earth sciences, particularly ecology, planetary science, hydrology, or actuarial science.
• Desirable: experience in satellite, lidar, and remote sensing data.
• Desirable: experience working in a startup environment.

Characteristics and Skills:

• Emotional intelligence and situational leadership skills
• Ability to co-direct strong execution with a remote interdisciplinary team
• Excellent written and verbal communication of complex science and technology to laypeople, including development of visual aids
• Comfortable creating structure in an ambiguous environment, and comfortable with challenging structures if required
• Detail oriented
• Demonstrate optimistic realism
• Excited to work in a startup environment
• Passion for our mission
• Able to travel occasionally 24 trips/year)

Location:

We are a remote first company with the majority of the team in the US west coast time zone.