The Role
Saildrone is seeking a hands-on Oceanographic Program Data lead to fill a central role in the implementation of its missions focused on collecting oceanographic, atmospheric, fisheries, and passive acoustic data. This is an exciting opportunity to champion mission success for customers that include federal agencies, commercial companies, universities, and not-for-profit organizations. In this role you will directly support Saildrone’s Ocean Data business line through data management, data analysis, and customer engagement.
Responsibilities
Data Management and Analysis
- Monitoring mission data as it is collected from a range of scientific sensors, including: barometers, thermistors, CTDs, radiometers, CO2 sensors, pH sensors, acoustic doppler current profilers, and echosounders
- Assisting in offboarding and archiving raw data from saildrones and oceanographic sensors
- Serving as Saildrone’s data librarian, maintaining, organizing, and owning our data archive of oceanographic, atmospheric, and drone telemetry data
- Working with Software Engineering and Product teams to ensure data quality and; ensuring internal documentation is updated and accurate
- Migrating data to new file formats, supporting testing, and quality assessment analysis
- Coordinating the development of data quality controls and alerting mechanisms with internal technical teams
Customer Success
- Delivering data to customers and answering questions, requests, and inquiries into available data products throughout the mission lifecycle
- Onboarding customers, including developing and maintaining customer-facing documentation (data management plans and data product user guides)
- Working with our Fleet team to enhance our technical sensor management workflows, focusing on reliability and scale
- Writing and delivering sensor calibration reports for customers
Program & Product Management
- Working with Product, Operations, Business Development, and other internal teams to track customers’ evolving data needs across science missions, improve our delivery workflows, and harden our data pipelines
- Working with the Product team to develop customer requirements and requests (e.g. sensor requirements, data formats, data delivery pathways, feature requests) for roadmap planning and capability development. Act as an internal customer, testing and validating that the engineering work meets the set requirements.
- Be the voice of the customer to represent data requirements.
- Work with internal teams to ensure that mission success and customer deliverables related to data collection are met.
Required Skills and Experience
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree or higher in Oceanography or related equivalent scientific fields like climate science
- 3+ years of experience working with scientific data and/or sensor data
- Experience working with data quality standards and frameworks
- Disciplined, troubleshooter and highly organized
- Strong written and verbal communication skills
- Ability to be self-directed and operate in ambiguous situations
Desired Skills and Experience
- Skilled in conducting research, processing and visualizing data in Python or Matlab
- Experience with oceanographic & meteorological sensors, calibration, and drift
- Experience in customer success or related roles
- Experience working with AWS cloud services
- Experience working with cross-functional teams
- Ability to be self-directed and adapt to ambiguous situations
Physical Requirements
- Work is performed on a computer and requires ability to attend in-person and/or virtual meetings and operate a keyboard and other peripheral devices.
- Travel Requirements: A willingness to travel to science conferences to represent Saildrone, and engage with potential customers and sensor specialists
Location: This position is in Alameda, CA. Our waterfront office offers beautiful views of San Francisco Bay in always sunny Alameda. Even our walls have good karma, our offices mix software development with a hardware production line in the former airplane hangar used to film ‘The Matrix’.
