Role Overview

Title: Data Acquisition Specialist

Duration: 3-6 months initial contract period

Location: Global remote

Pay: Dependent on location & experience; benchmarked $27-37/hr for US-based specialist

Benefits Eligible: No

Manager: Head of Research, Ahinoam Pollack

Mission – Why we exist and why we need you

Geothermal energy is the most abundant renewable energy source in the world. There is 2,300 times more energy in geothermal heat in the ground than in oil, gas, coal, and methane combined. However, historically it’s been hard to find and expensive to develop. At Zanskar, we’re using better technology to find and develop new geothermal resources in order to make geothermal a cheap and vital contributor to a carbon-free electrical grid.

The research team at Zanskar is at the cutting edge of developing tools to pinpoint and characterize geothermal resources with higher precision than ever before. To achieve this capability, we rely on data and we need to collect as much of it as possible. This data acquisition position is crucial for our task of advancing geothermal development technology to the next level and enabling Zanskar to achieve its mission.

Outcomes - Problems you’ll solve

We need someone with a geological background to hunt through the literature and online resources both nationally and internationally to collect data we are interested in. Success looks like adding multiple and varied geophysical datasets into our databases that improve our AI and model performance. While we have several identified datasets, the role will also include identifying new relevant datasets that we can use. The Specialist’s day-to-day includes:

- Identifying new data from journals, publications, and other sources

- Digitizing tables, plots, and images, and QC’ing data

- Innovating the tools and processes of finding and digitizing data

- Inserting data into structured formats in our infrastructure

Competencies – What we’re looking for

- Familiarity with geoscience: the candidate should be familiar with typical geological and geophysical data types and the process of creating geological models. This position is ideal for a candidate who has recently completed or is completing a Masters in geophysics, geology, environmental studies, GIS, or reservoir/petroleum engineering. Experience in using common GIS tools such as ArcGIS or QGIS is important.

- Full-stack work ownership: A stand-out specialist requires both the ability for novel, creative thinking about where and how to acquire data as well as the ability to deal with the tedium of reliable, detailed-oriented digitization where quality assurance is key. The Head of R&D should be able to provide general guidance and receive reliable data at a rapid clip.

- Navigating research papers: the candidate should know how to search for papers on Google Scholar and be familiar with the general structure of research papers for quickly finding relevant data.

- Programming/technical: the work may necessitate some light programming in Python or SQL. Some basic programming competence is preferred. A good candidate is interested in searching for and learning how to use new digitizing and search tools that are helpful in the data acquisition process.