Associate
Boston, MA
General Opportunities /
Full-Time /
Hybrid
Join Cascade Climate, a new global nonprofit accelerating progress in interventions, technologies, and markets that harness earth’s natural systems to stabilize our climate. Since our launch last summer we have assembled a stellar founding team, and lined up large initial investments from philanthropic backers including the Grantham Foundation, Quadrature Climate Foundation, and Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. At Cascade, we’re helping build healthy, equitable, and science-driven fields for open-system climate interventions – these are approaches to managing, slowing and reversing climate change that harness natural systems and cycles already operating at planetary scale. We do this work with the tools of market shaping and field building - guiding and accelerating the development of these fields via coordination, innovative financing, behind-the-scenes partnership building, and more.
We are looking for a fast learner and well-rounded generalist: someone capable of managing complex projects independently, fast-tracking the team’s learning on new and technical topics, building new relationships and alliances, and creating form + structure in a fast-shifting, sometimes ambiguous field.
A great candidate might be a recent student or have up to 4 years of experience in a high-expectations environment. You might have worked at a startup, an innovative climate organization, a dynamic nonprofit organization, a management consultancy, a scientific/academic organization – or something else altogether. This is an entry-level position for someone who is very hungry to learn and get feedback. You don’t necessarily need to have a background in Earth science or have done previous climate work.
We care much more about you—your capabilities and mindsets—than about your exact background. Do you consistently show up with humility and contagious curiosity? Do you independently learn new things quickly and hungrily? Can you operate without a roadmap that’s been handed to you—tackling ambiguous problems and quickly imposing your own framework and structured plan? Are people wowed by the quality of written and analytical outputs you produce?
About Cascade
Cascade coordinates and resources ambitious initiatives across scientists, industry, and governments to overcome the core bottlenecks that are hindering progress in the most promising open-system climate interventions. As a species we are already—unintentionally and haphazardly—manipulating Earth’s climate system in ways that produce disastrous consequences for ourselves and the biosphere. Decarbonization must be our top priority but on its own cannot solve the climate emergency. We must embrace the need to harness Earth’s natural systems in the service of avoiding deeper harm. This will mean intervening in soils, rivers, oceans, glaciers and more—but doing so with great deliberation and care.
Our initial focus is advancing the development of a healthy market for enhanced rock weathering (ERW), underpinned by its scientific evidence base and its potential for gigaton-scale, durable carbon dioxide removal. As commercial activity in ERW ramps up, it is essential that we collectively steer toward a healthy, virtuous market cycle wherein large-scale deployments become a powerful engine for public scientific learning and growing public trust, along with declining uncertainties and costs. Over the course of 2024, we are looking to expand into a broader set of open-system climate intervention pathways. In 2024, we are excited to begin working on marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR) pathways–ocean alkalinity enhancement and direct ocean removal in particular.
For more context, you can read our blog post about the outlook for the ERW market or our broader thoughts on leveling the playing field for open-system carbon dioxide removal.
We are looking for someone who is
- Willing to approach complex problems with deep humility, low ego, empathy, and kindness.
- Comfortable working under uncertainty and a lack of any clear right answer. You enjoy learning to the next iteration, building the plane as you're flying it, and like making the rules more than playing by the rules.
- Good at building new relationships with a very wide variety of people grounded in trust and mutual vulnerability.
- An insatiably curious, hungry learning-machine. You probably go down rabbit holes in fields you only half understand, and enjoy asking dozens of questions to everyone you meet - but you don’t let those rabbit holes distract you from the ultimate goal.
- You aren’t afraid to get quantitative or parse hairy-looking scientific papers - but you also avoid letting “perfect” get in the way of “great” so that you can deliver great work quickly.
- An open-minded, flexible, and sharp thinker, excited to move between hypotheses and brainstorm collaboratively. You’re probably really into whiteboarding/brainstorming, and persistently seek what’s true.
- Deeply loving of the world and all who inhabit it, and you have a deep-seated desire to do something about devastating climate impacts.
Major roles and responsibilities:
- Embrace deep, multi-disciplinary landscapes of complex fields and synthesize scientific papers, startup business models, the incentives of organizations within an emerging industry, policy options across multiple geographies, and more highly diverse topics.
- Engage and build trust-based relationships with a wide variety of people across fields and market ecosystems
- Conduct quantitative analysis, modeling, and support on critical projects
- Locate and manage high quality data that sheds new light on problems and solutions
In addition to these broader responsibilities, some of the specific projects you may work on include:
- Analyze and leverage insights from analogous fields and industries to inform the development of carbon removal and climate intervention pathways
- Coordinating among diverse stakeholders to develop and implement a community data access framework
- Conduct industry-wide meta-analysis and synthesis to develop a comprehensive R&D roadmap for open system carbon removal pathways
- Contribute to measurement and verification frameworks for marine carbon removal strategies
- Craft compelling and insightful articles and blogs from our organizational insight to enrich content creation efforts
Desired Skills and Experiences
- Up to 4 years of cumulative work experience
- A passion for climate
- Demonstrated initiative and accomplishment in previous work
- Ability to stick with a problem through resolution but also knowing when to ask for help
- Able to listen actively, be diplomatic, and share knowledge and information well
- Willingness to plunge into unfamiliar disciplines and take risks by exploring and testing new ideas
- Experience working among diverse groups with varying perspectives and/or facilitating challenging conversations
$50,000 - $110,000 a year
Cascade offers a competitive salary and benefits package, including:
• Medical, dental, vision insurance
• 401(k) matching
• Professional and personal development
• Generous paid time off, parental/family leave, and sick leave
• Flexible working hours
If this broadly describes you, we think you’ll feel at home here, and will join a team of experienced and very like-minded people who will take great care to support you and your continued growth.
No one will perfectly meet everything in the description above. We encourage anyone who is interested in this role to apply, regardless of whether you feel you meet 100% of the qualifications. The top candidates will bring their own unique perspectives, experiences, and backgrounds along with many but not necessarily all the skills and characteristics listed above. We offer professional learning and training opportunities to help you develop skills you may not have had the opportunity to cultivate yet.
Location
Candidates must be based in the United States or be willing to relocate to the US. Cascade is headquartered in Boston and has small hubs in Washington D.C., New York City, and the Bay Area. For this role, we have a strong preference for Associate candidates to either be based in greater Boston or willing to relocate.
We love seeing each other in person. We gather regularly (often in Boston) for team time like retreats, learning experiences, and whiteboarding sessions. Be ready to travel at least once per month—and occasionally a bit more as needed—for conferences, team gatherings, and partner meetings.
Diversity
At Cascade, our mission is to dramatically accelerate progress across a range of open-system climate interventions in order to ensure a healthy, livable Earth for all humanity. Recruiting, hiring, mentoring, and retaining a diverse workforce that reflects the communities we serve is critical to our success. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran.
Cascade is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.
