Head of Science, Climate

[Stripe Climate](https://stripe.com/climate) is working to build a market for carbon removal by pooling demand from businesses, and then using those funds to help promising new carbon removal technologies accelerate down the cost curve. If successful, we'll increase the likelihood that the world has the portfolio of solutions needed to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change. (Read more about our approach [here](https://www.wsj.com/articles/payments-company-stripe-is-kick-starting-market-for-carbon-removal-11635274208), and see all carbon removal applicants so far [here](https://github.com/stripe/carbon-removal-source-materials).) Paramount to this work is identifying which carbon removal approaches have the future potential for low-cost and high-volume deployment, despite that not being true today. As the first Head of Science, you'll help find, diligence, and select the most promising carbon removal technologies from an increasingly diverse sea of approaches. This role requires deep science and technical expertise, intellectual flexibility, holistic thinking and excellent judgment. If that sounds like you, we'd love to hear from you. ## You will: Set the bar for scientific rigor, credibility and vision in carbon removal purchasing, with responsibilities across 3 main areas: * Diligence: Lead scientific and technical diligence to evaluate an increasingly diverse portfolio of carbon removal approaches - from direct air capture, to electrochemical ocean capture, to enhanced weathering, to micro and macroalgae, to synthetic biology. To help do this, you'll develop and manage a diverse group of external advisors. * Thesis-driven research & discovery: Develop and consistently evolve your thesis on where there's untapped opportunity, and find the teams working on the most promising carbon removal approaches in the world so that we can work to help accelerate their progress. * Ecosystem development: Identify bottlenecks for the field of carbon removal and push the field to solve them, alongside the rest of the climate team. ## We're looking for someone with: * Science and technical expertise: You have an advanced degree in a climate-relevant scientific or engineering field such as: chemical engineering, mechanical engineering, physical chemistry, energy systems, etc. * Demonstrated leadership & judgment: You've led rigorous scientific and technical diligence processes across a diverse set of technologies. You understand and effectively balance risk and uncertainty against the potential of promising new carbon removal approaches. * Holistic thinking: You think holistically about what will make an approach successful, from the underlying science to the many other factors that will also determine whether it reaches significant scale. * Intellectual flexibility: You bring deep expertise and yet remain open-minded to new information in a rapidly-evolving field. You're deeply curious and excited to work across disciplines and engage with expertise beyond your own. ## Nice to haves: * Allocated large budgets towards frontier technologies (such as government grant programs like ARPA-E) * PhD in a climate-relevant scientific or engineering discipline * Has a deep network across scientific fields relevant to carbon removal alongside an understanding of the landscape of technologies and the techno-economics of large scale carbon capture and storage systems * Has published widely respected research in climate and carbon removal and coordinated consensus reports among experts across disciplines (e.g. IPCC reports)

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