We are hiring two founding engineers to help us build our first products.

How do we best utilize software and data to tackle our planet's most urgent challenges? Being part of the answer to this question is why I am so excited about what we're building at Earthmover. I was trained as an engineer and a climate scientist, and previously co-founded CarbonPlan, a non-profit working to improve the quality of climate solutions through open data and tools. For the past ten years, I’ve been developing open source software and community projects that help scientists and engineers to make better use of climate and weather data. Collectively, we have a lot of work to do to address the climate crisis, and today, I'm more sure than ever that software and data are going to be key elements of our collective response to the challenges ahead.

A few months ago, Ryan Abernathey and I started Earthmover. As he wrote in his recent post, we’re building a "modern data stack" for science. Our mission is to empower our customers to use scientific data to address our planet’s most urgent challenges, particularly climate change.

As Earthmover's CTO, my first task is to build a world-class engineering team. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say we are looking for some of the best software engineers in the world. We have a compelling technical problem that directly supports our impact-focused mission. The years ahead are going to be very exciting!

Read more…

Earthmover, an early-stage startup, is building a platform for scientific data analytics in the cloud. Our mission is to empower our customers to use scientific data to address our planet’s most urgent challenges.

It started in the dark days of 2020. My life, like millions of others around the world, was suddenly and severely disrupted by the lockdowns. I was uncertain about the future and scared for my family. But I also experienced a euphoric sense of liberation: big changes are possible, and in fact may be just around the corner. We can break our patterns.

Like many other climate scientists, I also pondered the parallels between COVID and climate change: a dire global problem, illuminated by science, twisted by politics, and ultimately solvable through a mix of ambitious engineering and policy. I was deeply inspired by the heroic work of the scientists who raced to develop COVID vaccines. I realized I wanted to be part of something like that…for climate change.

At the same time, I was watching the continued rapid growth and adoption of the technology we have developed in the Pangeo project. What started in 2017 as a grassroots collaboration between scientists and software developers is now a global community with over 1000 participants. The open-source tools we work on–Zarr, Xarray, and Dask–are now in production at places like NASA, Microsoft, Google, and McKinsey. While I love my oceanography research, I realized that my software side thing had become my main thing.

The idea for Earthmover was born: a new “modern data stack” that would make working with huge scientific datasets (like those found in climate) a breeze.

Joe Hamman–a long-time friend and Pangeo collaborator who has already had a huge impact as a founder of CarbonPlan–was having similar thoughts of his own. The pieces started to fit into place. He was a perfect co-founder.

Read more…