Rainmaker Fellow, Radar Science

About the Fellowship

The Rainmaker Radar Science Fellowship is a paid, full-time research appointment for exceptional undergraduate and graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, recent graduates, and other early-career researchers. You will join Rainmaker's radar-science group and work alongside researchers on a scoped project drawn from the team's current research priorities, defined in collaboration with your research lead or mentor. Project matching considers available data, mentor capacity, team needs, and your background.

Fellows take responsibility for a concrete workstream while contributing to ongoing analysis, scientific review, and operational support across the radar team.

Examples of the Work

Fellowship projects change with Rainmaker's research and operational priorities. Examples include:

• Creating a radar-aircraft collocation atlas to investigate radar structures and dual-polarization features containing useful information about measured supercooled liquid water.
• Extending and validating an MRMS/MESH hail-event catalog and storm-object tracker.
• Building a radar evaluation framework for cloud-seeding operations.
• Automating an existing radar-analysis workflow used by Rainmaker scientists and operators.

Responsibilities

• 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 for domain experts.
• 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.

Requirements

• Current undergraduate, master's, or PhD students; postdoctoral researchers; recent graduates; and other early-career researchers are 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 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, CA or Norman, OK for the agreed appointment.

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, such as a validated dataset, novel retrieval, tracking system, analysis framework, or automated operational workflow.

Fellowship Details

Three-month, paid, full-time appointment with rolling applications and project-specific start dates. On-site in El Segundo, CA or Norman, OK. 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.

Pay

$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.