Climate Data Scientist, Sustainability

Watershed is the enterprise sustainability platform. Companies like Airbnb, Carlyle Group, FedEx, Visa, and Dr. Martens use Watershed to manage climate and ESG data, produce audit-ready metrics for voluntary and regulatory reporting including CSRD, and drive real decarbonization. Offices in San Francisco, New York, Denver, London, Paris, Berlin, Sydney, Mexico City, and remote team members across the US and Europe.

This is a technical, hands-on, and highly collaborative applied science role on the Methodology team, at the nexus of corporate sustainability, sustainability science, data, and software. You'll work closely with software engineers, data scientists, and product managers to build and maintain Watershed's built-in methodologies, keeping them up to date with the latest scientific developments and standards.

• Develop, maintain, and improve Watershed's built-in sustainability methodologies, translating sustainability science, GHG accounting standards, and emerging regulatory requirements into robust product logic.
• Partner with software engineers, data scientists, and product managers to design methodology features that are scientifically rigorous, auditable, scalable, and intuitive for customers.
• Work directly in and around the codebase: reviewing methodology implementations, writing technical specifications, contributing configuration or logic, and building tests that give confidence in scientific correctness.
• Interpret evolving standards and guidance, including the GHG Protocol, sustainability reporting frameworks, and sector-specific methodologies.
• Investigate complex customer and product questions where sustainability science, data quality, accounting rules, and business context intersect.
• Collaborate with go-to-market and customer-facing teams to explain methodology choices clearly to customers, auditors, and other stakeholders.

• Master's or PhD in climate science, environmental science, sustainability, industrial ecology, or another relevant quantitative field.
• 5+ years of experience in corporate sustainability, sustainability consulting, carbon accounting, climate strategy, or a related field.
• Deep knowledge of the application of, and reasoning behind, prevailing GHG accounting standards and sustainability reporting frameworks — at minimum the GHG Protocol Corporate Standard and Scope 3 Standard.
• Able to work in a Python codebase; comfortable reading code, reasoning about implementation details, and making contributions.
• Can communicate complex ideas clearly to a wide range of audiences, including scientific experts, academics, verifiers, auditors, customers, and engineers.

• Experience building or maintaining carbon accounting methodologies, emissions factor datasets, LCA models, or sustainability software.
• Familiarity with assurance or audit processes for GHG inventories or sustainability disclosures.
• Comfort working with data using Python, SQL, Typescript, or similar tools.

Salary: $193.5K – $202.1K USD per year.

Hybrid — San Francisco, 4 days/week in office. Watershed has hub offices in San Francisco, New York, London, and Mexico City and satellite offices in Denver, Sydney, Paris, and Berlin. Where we have offices, employees are expected to be in office for 4 days per week.