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…

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