Reference Scenario Lead

Sunlight reflection may be the only available option, alongside dramatic emissions reductions, adaptation, and rapid scaling of carbon removal, to rapidly limit many climate impacts over the coming decades.  But we don’t know nearly enough about it to make a scientifically-informed decision about potential deployment – and we’re not on a trajectory for rapid, legitimate decision making.

Reflective is a global, non-profit research organization aiming to radically accelerate the pace of sunlight reflection research. We equip the world with the data and tools needed to make informed decisions about sunlight reflection, fast enough to matter.

The role

Decision-makers evaluating SAI need a concrete, internally consistent account of what hypothetical early deployment would involve. Existing research addresses many individual components, but important questions remain about how they fit together. Reflective is developing a reference scenario that examines one or two specified cases, from precursor supply chains and aircraft to observing systems, data assimilation, and feedback control.

The resulting public document set will make assumptions, uncertainties, and practical constraints explicit so experts and governments can scrutinize and challenge them. Its purpose is to support assessment of SAI’s feasibility, costs, and consequences without presuming that deployment should occur.

The Reference Scenario Lead owns this. You are accountable for the reference scenario existing, being internally consistent, shipping on a date, and landing with the audiences who need it. This is a synthesis and delivery role, not a people-management role: the technical work will be done by Reflective scientists and engineers, external contractors, and academic collaborators, most of whom you will not manage directly.

Your job is to make one coherent thing out of many contributors' work — and to do a meaningful share of the analysis yourself.

The first six months are a scoping sprint. Before we hire further into this program, you will define what version one contains, what it explicitly excludes, who its canonical audiences are and what they need in order to trust it, and the workplan and hiring plan to deliver it.

What you'll do

• Own scope and delivery.
• Define what is in and out of version one, hold that line as contributors push to add, and ship on the committed date. You will maintain the dependency map across every workstream — deployment hardware, monitoring, data assimilation and feedback control — and surface conflicts before they become slips.
• Ensure internal consistency.
• The reference scenario's value is that its pieces cohere: the injection strategy has to match the aircraft's actual payload, the observing system has to support the assimilation approach, the feedback controller has to run on data the instruments can produce. You are the person who catches it when they don't. And where components cannot be reconciled, document the incompatibility and its implications rather than assuming it can be resolved.”
• Do a share of the technical work.
• Pick up two or three work streams yourself — likely those spanning multiple domains, such as scenario specification, supply-chain and cost analysis, or the interface between plume modeling and aircraft design — where cross-domain synthesis matters more than single-field depth.
• Manage external contracts and collaborations.
• Scope, commission, and quality-check work from aerospace engineering firms, instrument developers, national labs, and academic groups. You need enough technical judgment across trades to detect over-optimism and check vendors' claims.
• Define and serve the audience.
• Run a structured listening effort with the people whose assessment matters — technical experts in and around governments, major NGOs, independent scientists — to determine what they need to see to treat this work as credible, and shape the deliverables accordingly. Decide how the work is packaged: the version-one document set, its constituent white papers, and what gets released along the way. Coordinate independent technical review before public release and document how substantive critiques are addressed.
• Support the experiment.
• Connect the reference scenario with experiment feasibility work. Work with the Experiment Lead to identify scientific questions and technical assumptions that a potential aerosol microphysics experiment could help resolve. Use scenario analysis to inform candidate research designs and incorporate experimental evidence if it becomes available. Keep the reference scenario explicit about which conclusions rely on existing evidence and which depend on observations not yet obtained.
• How this role fits
• Reflective runs a matrix model: functional leads (science, engineering, data infrastructure, external affairs) own discipline quality and people development; program leads own outcomes. You own the reference scenario outcome. You will negotiate for contributors' time with functional leads rather than building a standing team, though the program may add one or two direct reports as it matures. You will report to the Head of Engineering and work closely with Reflective's leadership, Scientific Advisory Board, and academic partners, including the University of Chicago group whose early thinking helped shape this program.

This is a leadership role in the sense that matters here: you set the scenario's scope, you make the calls that keep it coherent, and the organization holds you accountable for whether it ships and lands. It is not a separate institute, and its direction is set within Reflective's strategy and governance.

Who you are

You have led delivery of a complex, first-of-its-kind technical program — a spacecraft capture, an aircraft development effort, a large systems-engineering project — where the milestones, dependencies, and interfaces had to be invented, not inherited.

You are technically fluent across several of: atmospheric science, aerosol physics, aerospace engineering, control systems, observing systems, techno-economic analysis. Breadth with sharp judgment beats depth in one field. You can read a CFD study, an instrument spec, and a cost model and tell which one is hiding a problem.

You decompose ambiguous problem spaces into explicit milestones and dependencies, and you have the discipline to cut scope to protect a ship date.

You work well through influence rather than authority — extracting quality work from contributors you don't manage, in academia, industry, and government.

You communicate precisely with non-specialist audiences and can represent technical work to policymakers and critics without overstating it.

You are comfortable with public scrutiny of your work, including from critics of this field, and see rigorous external critique as the point rather than a threat.

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 from a variety of industries along with many but not necessarily all the skills 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

Our goal is to hire the right person for the role regardless of location, but we have a slight preference for candidates who can work from our Bay Area office 2-3 days/week. The role can be fully remote and we are open to candidates based anywhere in the world who can overlap with our core working hours (9am-1pm PST). We may be able to sponsor visas for US-based foreign nationals and have a moving stipend to support candidates who would like to relocate to the Bay Area.

Regardless of location, we love seeing each other in person and believe regular co-location helps improve collaboration and team culture. As such, we plan regular team co-working weeks, typically in the Bay Area.