Local recruitment: Senior Water Resources Engineer

Tova Earth

Amherst, MA, USA 🇺🇸

London, UK 🇬🇧

Location: Hybrid, in person 3 days a week in London, UK or Amherst, USA

Employment Type: Full-time

Start Date: September 2025

Compensation: Compensation will be competitive with early-stage startup norms, location and level of experience, and includes salary, benefits, and equity options

About Tova

Tova is transforming how organizations understand and manage water risk. We leverage a proprietary machine learning hydrologic model to forecast water availability anywhere in the world, helping organizations proactively manage their water supply risks. Our team’s advances in water system analytics and modeling have been published in leading scientific journals, widely cited, and applied globally.

Tova was founded by Alexa Bruce (co-founder and CEO), a water resources engineer and former Arup consultant with a PhD in machine learning, and Prof Casey Brown (co-founder and Chief Science Officer), a world-renowned expert in climate and water with a Harvard PhD and professorial leadership in the field. The Tova team brings decades of research, policy, and practical experience to building scalable, tech-enabled solutions for climate resilience. They founded Tova to replace expensive and slow local analysis with actionable, science-backed tools that help organisations proactively manage the risks and opportunities of our changing earth.

Backed by early customers and strategic design partners, Tova is growing fast. We’re looking for exceptional talent to join our founding team and shape the future of water resilience.

About the Role

We’re seeking a Water Resources Engineer with deep technical expertise to lead implementation of advanced climate risk and hydrologic analyses. You’ll take ownership of core technical tasks for early customers and play a key role in building Tova’s modeling capabilities.

This is a rare opportunity to join a startup as one of its first five employees. You’ll work on high-impact problems, influence technical direction, and help define the company’s approach to climate resilience from the ground up.

Key Responsibilities

  • Lead technical tasks in water resource vulnerability assessments and long-term water system planning
  • Develop and manage scalable, reproducible Python-based modeling workflows for:
    • Climate and weather generation using synthetic weather generators and perturbed datasets
    • Hydrologic modeling
    • Climate stress testing
    • Vulnerability analysis and scenario analysis
  • Integrate long-term historical, paleo, and downscaled climate data
  • Define and evaluate water system performance metrics
  • Develop visualizations, documentation, and workshop materials to communicate insights

Qualifications

  • Master’s degree or PhD in a relevant field (e.g., Water Resources, Hydrology, Hydro climatology etc.)
  • 3–7 years of applied experience in water resources systems modelling/ hydrology/ hydro climatologic modeling in consulting and/or research roles
  • Expert-level Python
  • Experience with hydroclimatological modeling, water resources system modelling, climate datasets, and risk analysis
  • Familiarity with weather generation
  • Ability to communicate complex results to technical and non-technical audiences
  • Strong organizational and problem-solving skills

Nice to Have

  • Experience with HEC-HMS, RiverWare, or similar models
  • Familiarity with Decision Scaling (Brown et al., 2012; Ray and Brown, 2015) and other Decision Making Under Deep Uncertainty (DMDU) methodologies
  • Experience building batch/cloud simulation workflows
  • Publications or open-source contributions in water/climate modeling

Why Join Tova?

  • Be one of the first five employees at a high-impact climate tech startup
  • Work on mission-driven projects with scientific and real-world value
  • Collaborate with world leading researchers and technologists
  • Competitive salary, equity, and flexible work environment

How to Apply

To apply, please email alexa@tova.earth with:

  • A short note on why you’re interested in this role and in Tova
  • A link to your LinkedIn and attach your resume
  • (Optional but appreciated): An example of something you’ve built, organized, or owned that you’re proud of

We’re reviewing applications on a rolling basis and looking for someone to start in September 2025. If this sounds like you – or someone you know – please get in touch!

References

Brown, C., Ghile, Y., Laverty, M., & Li, K. (2012). Decision scaling: Linking bottom-up vulnerability analysis with climate projections in the water sector. Water Resources Research, 48(9). https://doi.org/10.1029/2011WR011212

Ray, P. A., & Brown, C. M. (2015). Confronting Climate Uncertainty in Water Resources Planning and Project Design: The Decision Tree Framework. World Bank Publications.


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DEGREE REQUIRED

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IHE Delft - MSc in Water and Sustainable Development