Note: The job is a remote job and is open to candidates in USA. Overstory uses AI and advanced satellite imagery to help electric utilities identify vegetation risks, prevent outages, reduce wildfire risks, and build a more resilient grid. The Staff Data Scientist Engineer - Wildfire will lead the scientific foundation of the Fuel Detection Model, developing research, validation, modeling, and interpretability methods while partnering with ML engineers and product teams to support production systems.
Responsibilities
- Lead research into how vegetation structure, fuel conditions, and wildfire risk can be estimated from satellite, LiDAR, and environmental data across diverse geographies
- Design rigorous validation and evaluation methodologies, including ground-truth strategies, uncertainty quantification, and error analysis tied to real-world impact
- Prototype and refine ML modeling approaches, then partner with ML engineers to translate them into production systems
- Integrate established fire science, such as fuel models and fire behavior frameworks, with data-driven methods
- Define scientific standards for experimentation, reproducibility, and model interpretability across the modeling organization
- Communicate research findings clearly to engineers, product teams, customers, and the broader wildfire science community
- Mentor ML engineers on scientific methodology and domain reasoning
Skills
- * 8+ years of applied research or data science experience in wildfire science, fire ecology, forestry, remote sensing, atmospheric science, or a related quantitative field
- * Deep expertise in remote sensing and geospatial analysis, including working with satellite imagery and large-scale environmental datasets
- * Strong statistical modeling and machine learning skills in Python, with tools like GeoPandas, scikit-learn, PyTorch, or XGBoost
- * Track record of designing validation studies and evaluation frameworks for environmental or geospatial models
- * Excellent communication skills, with the ability to make complex scientific work legible across technical and non-technical audience
- **Time Zone Requirement:** North America (NST, AST, EST, CST, MST, PST)
- We work remotely from eleven countries and are looking for candidates that are living and working in one of them: United States, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Ireland, Estonia, Portugal, France, Sweden, Switzerland, Denmark and Canada
- * Familiarity with fire behavior or fuels modeling frameworks (e.g., Rothermel-based models, LANDFIRE fuel classifications)
- * Experience integrating physics-based models with ML, or with active learning and uncertainty quantification
- * Peer-reviewed publications in wildfire science, remote sensing, or environmental modeling
- * Familiarity with GCP, Vertex AI, or similar cloud-based platforms
- * Experience in remote-first or globally distributed team
Benefits
- Flexible, autonomous and collaborative working environment rooted in trust - we build our work days around our lives, not the other way around
- Home office stipend
- Co-working budget
- Ongoing education budget
- To be part of truly mission-driven work that reduces wildfires, protects earth’s natural resources and helps solve our climate crisis
- We work remotely from eleven countries
- We gather once a year in-person for our unforgettable team gathering event
- Option to occasionally meet up for in-person collaboration
Company Overview