Rainmaker Fellow, Radar Science

Examples of the Work

Fellowship projects change with Rainmaker's research and operational priorities. Examples of the work our radar team may pursue include:

• Creating a radar-aircraft collocation atlas to investigate which radar structures and dual-polarization features contain useful information about measured supercooled liquid water.
• Extending and validating an MRMS/MESH hail-event catalog and storm-object tracker.
• Developing a benchmark for hail-core growth, motion, splitting, and decay.
• Building a carefully controlled radar evaluation framework for cloud-seeding or hail-suppression operations.
• Automating an existing radar-analysis workflow used by Rainmaker scientists and operators.

What You'll Do

• Build quality-controlled radar datasets aligned with aircraft, UAS, satellite, model, surface, or operational observations.
• Implement and validate radar-processing, feature-extraction, retrieval, storm-tracking, or statistical-analysis methods.
• Investigate how results vary with storm type, range, terrain, temperature regime, observing geometry, and data quality.
• Develop honest baselines and quantify uncertainty, false detections, selection effects, and failure modes.
• Create case visualizations and scientific analyses that domain experts can inspect.
• Avoid overstating what radar observations can establish about seedability or intervention effects.
• Produce clear, reusable code and documentation.
• Present findings to Rainmaker's radar scientists, meteorologists, operators, and technical leadership.
• Deliver a final artifact such as a validated dataset, case atlas, tracking system, retrieval candidate, operational product, analysis protocol, or research paper.

What We're Looking For

• Current undergraduate, master's, or PhD students; postdoctoral researchers; recent graduates; and other early-career researchers are all eligible.
• Strong quantitative and programming ability, preferably in Python.
• Experience with radar meteorology, atmospheric science, signal processing, remote sensing, image analysis, geospatial data, or a closely related field.
• Ability to formulate a scientific question, implement an analysis, and validate the result carefully.
• Comfort working with large, imperfect observational datasets.
• High agency and the ability to take responsibility for a bounded workstream while collaborating with experienced researchers.
• Clear written and verbal communication.
• Availability for full-time, on-site work in El Segundo for the agreed appointment.

Particularly Relevant Experience

• Weather radar, polarimetric radar, MRMS, NEXRAD, quantitative precipitation estimation, storm-object tracking, cloud radar, or radar retrievals.
• Scientific Python, xarray, geospatial processing, visualization, statistical modeling, or ML for physical data.
• Cloud microphysics, mixed-phase clouds, hail, severe convection, or weather modification.
• Aircraft, UAS, field-campaign, or instrument-validation data.

What Success Looks Like

By the end of the fellowship, you will have answered a clearly defined scientific or operational question and delivered a result the radar team can continue using. Depending on the project, that might be a validated dataset, case atlas, retrieval, tracking system, analysis framework, or automated operational workflow.

Success means producing a scientifically defensible result with clear quality controls, uncertainty, and attribution boundaries—not forcing a conclusion that the data cannot support.

Fellowship Details

• Paid, full-time, and on-site in El Segundo.
• Three-to-six-month appointment, with four months as the standard duration.
• Rolling applications and project-specific start dates.
• Attached directly to Rainmaker's radar-science group with a named mentor.
• Possible consideration for future full-time roles, without any promise or expectation of conversion.
• Publication may be supported when it does not compromise Rainmaker intellectual property or operational know-how.

Compensation and Benefits

$8,000 per month

Benefits

• Full health coverage (medical, dental, and vision insurance)
• Lunch provided when working in-office and a fully stocked kitchenette
• Free EV charging at the HQ