Rainmaker Fellow, Radar Science

About the role

Rainmaker is pioneering a modern cloud-seeding system to increase precipitation, improve water availability, and address severe-weather challenges. The Rainmaker Radar Science Fellowship is a paid, full-time research appointment designed for exceptional undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, recent graduates, and other early-career researchers seeking hands-on experience in operational meteorology. You will join Rainmaker's radar-science group and own a scoped project that directly supports real-world precipitation-enhancement programs and operational decision-making. Your work will involve close collaboration with scientists and operators who rely on your radar analysis to make timely, evidence-based decisions in the field. The fellowship emphasizes scientific rigor, clear communication, and the delivery of concrete artifacts that integrate smoothly into ongoing operations. You will take responsibility for an end-to-end workstream, from data curation and method validation to visualization, documentation, and presentation. Examples of potential projects include creating a radar-aircraft collocation atlas, extending hail-event catalogs, building controlled evaluation frameworks for cloud-seeding, and automating existing analysis workflows.

Key facts

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 tailored to evolving research questions.

Investigate how results vary with storm type, range, terrain, temperature regime, observing geometry, and data quality to ensure robust conclusions.

Develop honest baselines and quantify uncertainty, false detections, selection effects, and failure modes to support transparent decision-making.

Create case visualizations and scientific analyses that domain experts can inspect and use to refine operational strategies.

Produce clear, reusable code and documentation that enable other team members to reproduce and extend your work efficiently.

Present findings to Rainmaker's radar scientists, meteorologists, operators, and technical leadership to align outputs with operational needs.

Deliver a final artifact such as a validated dataset, novel retrieval, tracking system, analysis framework, or automated operational product that adds lasting value.

Requirements

Current undergraduate, master's, or PhD students; postdoctoral researchers; recent graduates; and other early-career researchers are all eligible to apply for this fellowship.

Strong quantitative and programming ability, preferably demonstrated through work in Python or comparable scientific languages.

Experience with radar meteorology, atmospheric science, signal processing, remote sensing, image analysis, geospatial data, or a closely related field is essential.

Ability to formulate a scientific question, implement a rigorous analysis, and validate the result carefully against observations and constraints.

Comfort working with large, imperfect observational datasets that contain noise, gaps, and complex artifacts.

High agency and the ability to take responsibility for a bounded workstream while collaborating effectively with experienced researchers.

Clear written and verbal communication skills to translate technical results into actionable insights for non-technical stakeholders.

Availability for full-time, on-site work in El Segundo for the agreed appointment, with consistent presence during standard operational hours.

Practical notes

This is a paid, full-time, on-site fellowship based in El Segundo, California, with a standard three-month initial appointment and rolling applications tied to project-specific start dates. Fellows are expected to work full-time hours during their agreed appointment period and must be available for on-site work at the Rainmaker headquarters. Travel requirements will be limited to positions based in El Segundo, with no additional domestic or international travel expected as part of this role. Candidates must hold a degree or be actively pursuing a degree at an accredited institution and be eligible for full-time employment in the United States without sponsorship for this appointment. Publication of results may be supported when it does not compromise Rainmaker intellectual property or operational know-how, subject to internal review and agreements. Conversion to a full-time role is not guaranteed and involves separate evaluation processes managed by Rainmaker leadership.