Climate Data Scientist, Sustainability

Watershed • San Francisco, CA

1d • $193,500 - $202,100 • Hybrid

About The Position

Watershed is an enterprise sustainability platform that helps companies manage climate and ESG data, produce audit-ready metrics for voluntary and regulatory reporting (including CSRD), and drive decarbonization. The Methodology team operates at the intersection of corporate sustainability, sustainability science, data, and software. This role is technical, hands-on, and collaborative, focusing on developing and maintaining the company's built-in methodologies. The goal is to translate scientific developments and standards into product capabilities that enable companies to understand and reduce their real-world impact, ensuring credibility, accessibility, and actionability of data.

Requirements

• 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 — ideally working with large, complex organizations.
• Systems thinker who can zoom out to understand interconnected sustainability and business systems, then zoom in to identify high‑leverage technical solutions and anticipate unintended impacts.
• Deep knowledge of both 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; familiarity with the GHG Protocol Land Sector and Removals Guidance and updated ESRS is a plus.
• Able to work in a Python codebase. Comfortable reading code, reasoning about implementation details, and making contributions to the codebase.
• Can communicate complex ideas clearly to a wide range of audiences, including scientific experts, academics, verifiers, auditors, customers, internal business stakeholders, software engineers, and data scientists.

Nice To Haves

• 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.
• Experience translating complex standards or scientific methods into operational guidance, technical specifications, or product requirements.
• Experience working with engineers to translate scientific methods into tested, production-grade software.

Responsibilities

• 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 closely 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 clear technical specifications, contributing configuration or logic where appropriate, and helping build tests that give us confidence in scientific correctness.
• Interpret evolving standards and guidance — including the GHG Protocol, sustainability reporting frameworks, and sector-specific methodologies — and determine how they should be reflected in Watershed’s product.
• Investigate complex customer and product questions where sustainability science, data quality, accounting rules, and business context intersect.
• Build pragmatic approaches for messy real-world business data, balancing scientific rigor with usability, auditability, and customer impact.
• Collaborate with our go-to-market and customer-facing teams to explain methodology choices clearly to customers, auditors, and other stakeholders.
• Help set the bar for scientific quality across Watershed by documenting decisions, reviewing methodology changes, and contributing to our internal methodology standards.

Benefits

• Watershed has offices in San Francisco, New York, Denver, London, Paris, Berlin, Sydney, Mexico City, and remote team members across the US and Europe.
• Reasonable accommodations for candidates with disabilities, long-term conditions, mental health needs, religious observances, neurodivergence, or pregnancy-related support requirements.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior