Science Communicator

The Company

Sofar is on a mission to connect the world’s oceans. We design, build, and deploy the largest privately owned network of marine weather sensors to power the world’s best marine weather forecasts. Our data helps our customers to increase efficiency and reduce emissions, delivering tools to governments and other stakeholders to understand impacts of climate change on extreme weather and ocean health. We live on Planet Ocean, and our goal is to create the ocean intelligence needed to ensure a sustainable future.

The Role

We feel that we have an amazing story to tell - and we want you to help us tell it! We are seeking a strong science communicator to help us tell the stories of Sofar. We want to present unexpected insights from our observations to the world, find an interesting angle to discuss route optimization, or generally report on the awesomeness that is the ocean. In this role, you will:

• Translate technical subjects into accessible stories for both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Develop reports that showcase the value and applications of our marine weather data.
• Create insights to support marketing campaigns and thought leadership content.
• Build toward an annual comprehensive report that will serve as our flagship publication.
• Partner with designers to craft clear, accessible visualizations tailored to expert and general audiences.

You'll collaborate with scientists and engineers across our team to access and interpret our data, while working closely with Marketing to align your analyses with audience needs and communication strategies.

Example projects include:

• Summarizing extreme waves observed by our observational network in 2025 and cross-referencing with notable events and impacts.
• Report on the state of ocean observations: how many sensors are there, what do they measure, why does it matter?
• Explain the impact of geo-political events (Pirates!) on ship routing and fuel usage.
• Explain why sometimes weather helps safe fuel e.g. through favorable currents
• Use Sofar insights routing sail assisted vessels to explain sails on bulk carriers make sense.
• Your own compelling story about data and impact.

• Enjoy and excel at written communication to a broad audience.
• You have proven experience with broad-audience science communication.
• You have the ability and desire to understand complex topics in science and engineering.
• You have the ability to identify nuggets of interest to either a wider audience or our customers.
• You excel at working with complex data in a variety of formats.
• You are able to write an initial draft and/or visualizations from raw data.
• You enjoy collaborating with others, including marketing, designers, engineers and scientists, to translate the drafts into impactful blogs, publications, etc.
• You are comfortable to operate independently with only high level guidance, seeking clarification when needed, and keeping relevant stakeholders informed.
• Comfortable with Python, R, Julia or similar scripting language(s).

Bonus Points

• Graduate degree in Weather, Oceanography, Vessel Modeling, or a related field.
• Experience working with environmental geospatial data, scientific data formats (netCDF, GRIB), and geospatial analysis libraries (e.g. pandas, xarray, dask, GDAL, cartopy, plotly/matplotlib)
• Passion for the ocean

• $130,000 - $178,000
• The range listed is what we reasonably expect to pay for this role at the time of this posting. We may ultimately pay more or less than the posted range and may be modified in the future. Actual compensation packages are based on several factors that are unique to each candidate, including but not limited to skill set, experience, and equity package.

We at Sofar Ocean acknowledge that careers in the marine sciences “... have traditionally been, and remain, non-diverse work environments”, thereby limiting the entry and prosperity of underrepresented groups in the space. (Johri et al., 2021) Many of these same groups are disproportionately affected by climate change, and are often excluded from decision making that directly address their interests and needs.

We are committed to addressing these climate injustices and highly encourage people who identify as women, LGBTQ+, Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) to apply

Employee Conduct

It is the responsibility of every employee to contribute to a positive work environment through cooperative and professional interactions with co-workers, customers, and vendors.

All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, protected veteran status, disability, or any other factors prohibited by law.