SCOOP Carbon Accounting Core Model Engineer
Job description summary
- Title: SCOOP Carbon Accounting Core Model Engineer
- Posted: 9/9/26
- Application Deadline: 9/13/26 (or until filled)
- Start Date: 9/14/26 preferred
- How to apply: Use Handshake to upload your Resume or CV, including relevant work and coursework, as well as a cover letter and copy of your transcript.
- Questions: Contact Katrina Pugh (katrina.pugh@tufts.edu)
- Compensation: $20-30/hour
- Hours/week: 10-15
- Duration: Fall Semester, 2026 (optional extension into Spring Semester, 2027)
About the SCOOP Carbon Accounting Program
The SCOOP Core Model Engineer role is a great opportunity for somebody who is committed to building and using their practical design and development skills for the planet.
Sustainable Carbon Options with Open Protocols (SCOOP) is part of the latest Auster Center initiative, Environmental Innovation. Carbon markets are broken as there is currently no single methodology for producing, conveying, and using carbon accounting data. First, many carbon offsets are issued under bespoke processes that lack industry-wide credibility. Second, year-end reporting cadences are far too coarse for actual accounting. Third, investors, regulators, and corporate offset buyers cannot reliably compare projects, restate historical figures, or trace a credit back to its dynamic physical origin. This is the missing infrastructure layer of the climate economy. It is also exactly the kind of problem that the Tufts Auster Center for Applied Innovation and Research exists to support: a technical, transdisciplinary, and translational problem with a clear path from research to deployed practice.
The SCOOP Project is an initiative applying sustainability science, information technology and financial accounting principles in a general liability-and-asset Measurement, Monitoring, Reporting, and Validation (MMRV) accounting framework.
We are engineers, social scientists, economists, and environmentalists, bringing transformations and transparency to open up markets. We serve a range of players, from carbon asset or liability owner, to carbon project rater, to carbon registry owner, to carbon exchange, and a multitude of different local and country policy makers. The goal of SCOOP is to bring together the fragmentation across the carbon supply chain.
SCOOP is primarily a data platform – developing and/or connecting tools that normalize carbon claims and emission against standards, calculate dynamic carbon measures, and enable market participants to peel back the lineage of carbon claims. At the same time, it is also a collaboration problem.
Core Model Engineer Role.
The job of the Core Model Engineer-- in collaboration with the SCOOP Data Engineering and Impact Network/Ecosystem teams -- is to design and develop the SCOOP core model, which improves the flow of information throughout the carbon data supply chain and into financial markets. This may ultimately use a combination of advanced privacy and block chain tools. SCOOP will evolve incrementally as a culmination of a small number of prototypes (e.g., with an AI data center owner, a carbon project owner, a carbon project rater, or a market maker) and incrementally playout functionality and instantiate the IEEE P7802 standard.
Inputs to those prototypes include, but are not limited to:
- Defining the SCOOP core model stack and, working with the network/ecosystem team to verify needs and priorities at each layer (Software engineering). For example,
- basic requirements relate to data transformation and normalization through the carbon supply chain using cloud-based utilities.
- Longer-term requirements may include scenario and risk analysis, e.g., modeling markets and policy impacts in collaboration with policy makers, claimants, emitters, and investors.
- Mapping and summarizing requirements around the SCOOP principles (Software architecture):
- Interoperability
- Measuring externalities
- Verifiability
- Decentralization
- Privacy
- Scalability
- Traceability
- Building out and testing instances of the Core Model, with an eye towards reuse -- economies of scale (e.g., scaling up to high processing volumes) and economies of scope (e.g., multiple industries using SCOOP core model to measure carbon claims, offsets, verifications, registries, and settlements). (Service architecture).
- Evaluating and selecting tools in collaboration with the data engineering team (e.g., data movement [ETL] tools, block chain, AI-based development tools).
- Selecting and implementing a secure code versioning platform.
- Working with SCOOP data and network teams to build out a (self-) service architecture that supports various types of corporate and academic developers (carbon claimants, emitters), service providers, policy makers, and auditors.
Skills for the Core Model Engineer
The skills that this person will require include
- Software engineering and testing for scale and scope, including a service architecture (e.g., API development).
- Proficiency in and ability to acquire programming languages, such as Python, Java, JavaScript.
- Data management, such as schemas, relational or NoSQL data stores.
- Cloud (e.g., using platforms like AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud).
- Software performance optimization
- DevOps, version management and reporting
- Security, such as secure coding, threat modeling, and tracking
- Project management and communication, especially across science disciplines and to non-technical audiences
Compensation for the Core Model Engineer
Compensation will be commensurate with the student’s or post-doc’s experience and relevant skills.