Principal Scientist
Rho Impact’s employees are committed to making our communities and the world a better place. Your work will be appreciated by your team, across the company, and far beyond. You will have a direct hand in strengthening and improving the impact measurement and management (IMM) efforts taking shape in every industry globally and often at the forefront of investment in cutting-edge technologies. Rho Impact culture is supportive and we provide opportunities to grow and promote each other’s individual talents, passions and wellbeing. If you share these values, we invite you to join us!
The Opportunity:
Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) and Impact Measurement and Management (IMM) issues are wide-ranging. Rho Impact provides tailor-made solutions that combine software with experts in order to help organizations of all sizes set priorities, understand their footprints, and meet their ESG goals, supported by superior information management and data analytics services and tools. Therefore, Rho Impact is seeking an experienced, compassionate, and curious Principal Scientist to lead our growing IMM Accounting team and to support our ESG Advisory Practice, as we build world-class software to help our clients plan, track, and report on their impacts and ESG strategies.
This is an opportunity to help build a cutting edge advisory and technical analysis function within a mission-driven organization focused on raising the quality of sustainability, impact and ESG analytics available to corporations and investors today. As Rho Impact’s Principal Scientist, you will work closely with the Chief Scientific Officer and own both client and internally-facing IMM data operations, define protocols and best practices, provide guidance to the broader team and design impact assessment and data transformation methodologies.
About You:
- Leader and a creator
- Know that delivering the best solution to the customer requires teamwork
- Are both a mentor and an eternal student who understands that, as a senior member of the team, you are expected to lead by example while creating pathways for success
- Have the ability to work independently and navigate ambiguity
- Enthusiastic explorer of complex systems
- Have the ability to listen deeply and to synthesize information to reach solutions quickly
- Are well organized, highly detail oriented, methodical, and have strong time management skills
- Have excellent verbal and written communication skills
- Have a passion for excellence, a good sense of humor, empathy and humility
- Have a driving motivation to address climate change and reduce environmental and social harm
- Are comfortable building from the ground up
Responsibilities
- Scoping and directing advisory projects and identifying additional opportunities based on fruitful interactions with clients, and in response to and in anticipation of their IMM needs.
- Being a key advisor, reviewer and contributing member to our product design processes to ensure they meet rigorous scientific integrity and quality standards
- Planning and organizing multi-month projects in which you collaborate directly with clients and members of the Rho Impact team
- Leading a team of data entry specialists, analysts, and carbon accountants in gathering of essential organizational and operational data for the purposes of IMM accounting through robust, high resolution inventories, and addressing greenhouse gas (GHG) accounting and reporting, water consumption, waste generation, plastics production
- Managing and refining data collection systems and validation to support Rho Impact’s integrated resource accounting models and tools
- Evolving our dimensional analysis methods, protocols and systems
- Building out impact factor and metrics conversions database and protocols
- Supporting other services for IMM, including development and instantiation of organizational, high resolution input-output models
- Developing technical models of low-GHG emerging technologies to support CRANE-based analyses
- Organizing and directing our Research Fellow Network and Impact Accounting Internship programs
- Directing a team of research analysts to execute high quality secondary research on the emissions impacts of relevant existing technologies and emerging technologies
Requirements
- Graduate degree in a field relevant to sustainability and/or impact analytics (e.g., physical or social sciences, engineering, or other analytical fields such as data science/statistics, applied math, economics, computer science)
- 5+ years of direct experience in providing quantitative analytics to clients
- 10+ years direct experience in energy and/or material modeling and analysis, complex systems analysis, life cycle assessment, and/or emissions accounting preferred
- Clear track record of designing and executing high quality quantitative research
- Proven ability to communicate technical concepts to diverse audiences
- Proven ability to conduct techno-economic assessment of climate solutions across a broad range of industries
- 3+ years of experience in growing and managing a team preferred
- Experience with impact measurement frameworks preferred
- Experience interacting with investors, financial institutions, and entrepreneurs strongly preferred
- Experience with software development (direct or adjacent) preferred
- Experience with geospatial analysis preferred
- Willingness to master our software platforms (Rho Impact and CRANE)
- Experience with forward-looking impact analysis (projections) preferred
- Authorized to work lawfully in the United States