Machine Learning Engineer / Data Scientist - Climate and Energy Policy

Top Level Summary

 Planet Reimagined is seeking a Machine Learning Engineer / Data Scientist to design and build cutting-edge data systems that accelerate climate solutions across local and federal scales. Join our mission-driven team building one of the world's first ML systems for hyper-local policy analysis and recommendations. You'll design, train, and deploy models, and build the knowledge graphs, wikis, and other structured datasets behind them, to identify successful climate interventions, predict how they adapt to new contexts, and optimize renewable energy deployment from city councils to federal land management.

About Planet Reimagined 

Founded by a multi-platinum musician and a UN advocate, Planet Reimagined was built on the belief that big change happens when people act together and when that action drives shifts in policy and industry. On a mission to deliver fair solutions for people and the planet, we use an innovative action research method to incubate and scale creative solutions to our most pressing climate problems. We mobilize fans at concerts to take real-time civic action, and we help renewable energy companies access public lands once closed to them. From legislative wins to global campaigns, we turn bold ideas into action. And we’re just getting started.

About the Role

Join a team of creative problem-solvers dedicated to advancing global climate solutions. The Machine Learning Engineer / Data Scientist will build the data infrastructure powering insights for climate policy, renewable energy optimization, and scalable climate interventions. This role will work at the intersection of data engineering, AI/ML, and climate policy, developing tools to help communities and governments replicate successful climate solutions.

Responsibilities
 

Knowledge Systems & LLMs

• Build LLM-powered knowledge graphs, wikis, and other structured datasets from policy documents, municipal records, community sentiment, and federal energy data, along with the human-readable layers rendered from them.
• Develop LLM and NLP pipelines that extract policy elements, resolve entities, and link them across sources
• Track data provenance so every policy element traces back to its source document, passage, and extraction method
• Design human-in-the-loop workflows where policy experts validate extracted policy elements, and their corrections improve the models, scripts, and prompts
• Construct policy timelines by extracting and ordering events to show how climate solutions unfold over time

Machine Learning & Modeling

• Design, train, and deploy models for policy effectiveness scoring, solution replicability, and energy development potential
• Build recommendation and graph-based models that match proven climate policies to a specific city, county, or community
• Own the full modeling lifecycle: baselines, feature engineering, model selection, tuning, and error analysis
• Develop evaluation frameworks to measure model, extraction, and LLM output quality against expert-validated ground truth
• Analyse community-stentiment data to quantify support for climate policies within surveyed localities

Causal Analysis & Data Science

• Build systems to facilitate rigorous comparative analysis, helping policy experts map when, where, and how policies succeed and identify causal dynamics that may transfer to other contexts.
• Analyze policy timelines to measure adoption lags, implementation speed, and time to impact
• Perform exploratory analysis and predictive modeling to find patterns in climate solution adoption and renewable energy development opportunities
• Communicate findings through visualizations and automated reporting for climate and energy transition planning
• Deliver insights from the analysis of interaction and call-to-action conversion data to improve in-concert advocacy efforts

MLOps & System Development

• Build reproducible training, evaluation, and deployment pipelines with experiment tracking, versioning, and a model registry
• Automate CI/CD for models, with validation gates and staged rollouts
• Maintain the data pipelines and API integrations (BigQuery, Cloud Functions) that feed models from government, community, and federal data sources
• Monitor model performance, data drift, and knowledge graph quality, with data governance for sensitive municipal data and PII.

Required Qualifications

• 3-5 years of experience in data science and ML engineering, preferably in GCP/AWS/Azure ecosystem
• Strong proficiency in LLM application design, context engineering strategies, Python, and SQL
• Hands-on experience building functional knowledge systems for LLM applications
• Proven ability to work with varied, unstructured data sources including municipal records and reports, news coverage, video documentation, and government datasets. 
• Strong problem-solving skills and ability to thrive in ambiguous climate policy and energy environments
• Excellent communication skills for cross-functional collaboration with policy experts, community stakeholders, and federal planners including turning data analysis into data storytelling outputs.

Technical Skills

• Core Stack: Python, SQL, BigQuery, GCP/AWS/Azure services
• Data Tools: Pandas, NumPy, dbt, Apache Beam/Dataflow
• API Development: REST APIs, government data integrations, real-time community sentiment and federal climate data augmentation
• Infrastructure: Cloud Functions, Pub/Sub, Cloud Run, CI/CD with Cloud Build
• Databases: BigQuery (primary), Firestore, vector databases (Vertex AI Vector Search, Pinecone)

Nice to Have

• Background or strong interest in climate policy, municipal governance, federal land management, or energy transition planning
• Experience with government data sources, regulatory documents, federal climate records, and civic data standards
• Knowledge of policy analysis frameworks, community engagement measurement, and renewable energy development processes
• Previous work in mission-driven organizations focused on local government, federal policy, or climate action

Ideal Candidate

You're a curious, adaptable engineer who gets energized by complex problems without clear solutions. You enjoy building systems from scratch, can navigate policy ambiguity with confidence, and are motivated by the potential to create tools that help communities and governments replicate successful climate solutions while optimizing renewable energy deployment. You balance technical excellence with practical climate impact, and you're excited to work at the intersection of data science, community-driven climate action, and federal energy policy.

Ready to help accelerate America's climate progress through data-driven policy solutions? We'd love to hear from you.

Salary and Benefits: 

The salary range for this position is $120,000 – 150,000.

The final offer will consider factors like the candidate’s location, cost of living, and experience level.

We take a location-aware approach to compensation to ensure fairness and competitiveness across markets. For example, within the U.S., this range aligns with typical salaries for similar roles in major markets such as New York or Seattle (generally $140,000–$150,000) and mid-cost regions such as Dallas or Charlotte (typically $120,000–$130,000).

U.S.-based full-time employees are eligible for a comprehensive benefits package, including healthcare, dental, and vision coverage, retirement plans, and paid time off. Additional benefits include a remote but highly collegial working environment.

Conditions of employment include:

• Ability to pass a background check.
• Ability to provide 3 professional references including a recent supervisor

What you can expect from our hiring process: 

• Initial Phone Screen (15-20 mins)
• Take home assessment 
• One-on-one session with hiring manager to review your work
• Panel Interview with our team for you to present your work
• Final interview with our leadership team
• Reference checks
• Aggressive recruitment timeline with goal of offer by December 

Applications will be considered on a rolling basis with priority given to those who apply on or before October 23, 2026.