Rainmaker Fellow, Satellite Remote Sensing
About The Position
The Rainmaker Satellite Remote Sensing Fellowship is a paid, full-time research appointment for exceptional undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, recent graduates, and other early-career researchers. You will join Rainmaker's satellite remote-sensing group and work alongside our researchers on a scoped project drawn from the team's current research priorities and defined in close collaboration with your research lead or mentor. Project matching will consider available data, mentor capacity, team needs, and your background. You will take responsibility for a concrete computational workstream while contributing to ongoing retrieval, validation, automation, and operational-support work across the team.
Requirements
- Current undergraduate, master's, or PhD students; postdoctoral researchers; recent graduates; and other early-career researchers are all eligible.
- Strong quantitative and programming ability, preferably in Python.
- Experience with atmospheric remote sensing, satellite meteorology, physics, applied mathematics, electrical engineering, computer science, or a related field.
- Interest in microwave sounders, polar-orbiting observations, geostationary imagery, retrieval methods, or scientific data products.
- Ability to implement a scientific method, establish a baseline, and validate the result carefully.
- Comfort working with large, imperfect, multidimensional observational datasets.
- High agency and the ability to take responsibility for a bounded workstream while collaborating with experienced researchers.
- Clear written and verbal communication.
- Availability for full-time, on-site work in El Segundo for the agreed appointment.
Nice To Haves
- By the end of the fellowship, you will have answered a clearly defined scientific or operational question and delivered a trusted computational result the satellite remote-sensing team can continue using. Depending on the project, that might be a quality-controlled validation dataset, retrieval benchmark or improvement, error analysis, fusion prototype, automated data product, or operational workflow.
- Success does not require a positive result. A rigorous conclusion about what the available observations can and cannot support can be as valuable as an improved retrieval.
Responsibilities
- Acquire, process, collocate, and quality-control microwave, polar-orbiting, and geostationary satellite observations.
- Reproduce an existing retrieval or operational baseline before testing improvements.
- Validate satellite products against radar, NWP, soundings, surface observations, and Rainmaker aircraft, UAS, or in-situ measurements.
- Quantify detection skill, bias, uncertainty, spatial representativeness, latency, coverage, and failure modes by meteorological regime.
- Implement physically motivated, statistical, or ML retrieval improvements when justified by the project and data.
- Build documented, reproducible workflows that other Rainmaker scientists can run and extend.
- Present findings to satellite scientists, radar scientists, meteorologists, operators, and technical leadership.
- Deliver a final artifact such as a collocation dataset, retrieval benchmark, automated data product, error analysis, fusion prototype, or research paper.
Benefits
- Full health coverage (medical, dental, and vision insurance)
- Lunch provided when working in-office and a fully stocked kitchenette
- Free EV charging at the HQ
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Entry Level
Education Level
No Education Listed
