Senior Geospatial Machine Learning Engineer

The climate crisis is the defining challenge of our time—but it’s also the greatest opportunity for innovation, and a challenge we’re proud to take on. At Overstory, we’re harnessing cutting-edge technology to enable a resilient electrical grid that keeps communities thriving as our world changes.

The grid is the backbone of life as we know it. It powers hospitals, keeps food fresh, and ensures communities stay connected. But extreme weather, aging infrastructure, and growing wildfire risks are putting this critical system under pressure. All of this combined makes the electric utility industry the greatest opportunity for tackling climate change. 

One of the leading causes of catastrophic wildfires and power outages? Trees and brush coming into contact with power lines. 

That’s where we help. At Overstory, we use AI and advanced satellite imagery to pinpoint and prioritize vegetation risks before they materialize. By giving utilities critical analysis on those risks, we’re helping prevent outages, reduce wildfire risks, and accelerate the transition to a safer, more resilient grid.

Our team spans the Americas and Europe, and we work with utility partners across the Americas and beyond. We’re outdoor enthusiasts, musicians, artists, athletes, parents, and adventurers—15 nationalities strong and growing. What unites us is a passion for solving complex problems, a commitment to climate action, and the belief that technology should be a force for good.

Join us to help us build a more resilient world together. 

We are looking for a Senior Geospatial MLE to join the Vegetation Modeling team at Overstory. You’ll spend most of your time working within small groups on our team to experiment with, build, and improve algorithms for understanding how vegetation impacts our customers. In the past, we’ve developed solutions to coregister imagery, locate critical energy infrastructure, and identify tree species, heights, and health. Right now, we split our time between maintaining and improving these solutions, and developing new features to understand wildfire risk and assess the impact of different management strategies.

On our team, you’ll generally be working with satellite imagery and other geospatial datasets, and using machine learning or deep learning to analyze their contents. You’ll be regularly interfacing with our data and models through Python code, QGIS projects, and Dagster pipelines. You’ll thrive if you enjoy working with a cross-functional group of product, design, engineering, and platform team members, and being involved throughout the full scientific product lifecycle.

As a quickly-growing, early-stage startup, you’ll also be able to make significant contributions to the direction and culture of our organization. We collaborate closely with upstream teams responsible for ingesting data, and downstream teams that further refine or deliver those outputs to customers. You’ll be able to help shape how we work within our team and across the organization, influence how we make core decisions about our platform and pipelines, and scope out impactful projects.

What you’ll do

• Develop new vegetation intelligence products using standard geospatial Python libraries, as well as machine learning and deep learning tools

• Support existing products through data exploration, model improvements, and bugfixes, especially using QGIS, Dagster, Sentry, and Grafana

• Represent the team by leading projects and initiatives, being responsible for planning, execution, delivery, and ensuring the value of our contributions is clear to other stakeholders throughout the organization

• Build the tooling and processes necessary to measure the value and performance of our contributions, and help to make data-driven decisions about where we can have the greatest impact

About you

• At least 8 years of commercial experience as a Data Scientist or Machine Learning Engineer

• Advanced scientific Python experience, including numpy, scipy, scikit-learn, pandas

• Experience with geospatial or satellite data, and tooling such as gdal, rasterio, shapely, fiona, geopandas, QGIS

• Experience with deep learning algorithms, especially as applied to geospatial data, and tooling such as pytorch, tensorflow

• Experience leading small teams organized around projects or initiatives

• Passionate about climate

• Enjoy working in a remote first, fast-moving environment.

• You are based in GMT/ CET/ EST time zones

Nice-to-haves

• Experience at early-stage startups and remote-first organizations

• An understanding of the challenges of working with geospatial data at scale, as well as possible solutions to those challenges

• Deep industry experience in a unique geospatial or forest science domain, such as working with SAR imagery or developing and supporting wildfire products

If you don’t meet all of the above yet feel you have lots to offer, please apply anyway.

What you get 

• To be part of truly mission-driven work that reduces wildfires, protects earth’s natural resources and helps solve our climate crisis.

• Flexible working environment with a lot of autonomy. We build our work days around our lives, not the other way around.

• Other benefits like a remote working budget, an educational budget and time to develop new skills.

• To be surrounded by an excellent, vibrant, smart team who have each other's back and believe in a culture of openness, tolerance and respect.

• Equity and a competitive salary.

About our team

We are a group of 85 people from all over the world. Fifteen nationalities are represented in our team. We work remotely from nine different countries and we are looking for candidates that are also living and working in one of these countries: United States, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Ireland, Estonia, Portugal, France, Sweden, Denmark, Switzerland, and Canada. We meet up once a year in-person for our unforgettable team gathering event. We also offer the option to occasionally meet up for in-person collaboration.

Diversity & Inclusion

We place enormous value on diversity and inclusion and strive to continually bring in people of all genders, races, creeds, ethnicities, abilities and backgrounds. We believe that the best ideas emerge when people with different perspectives and approaches work together on a problem.

We’re always looking to diversify our team further, but we’re proud of the fact that four out of the nine people on our leadership team are female, 46% of the overall team are female and 20% of the team are people of color. Our team speaks fifteen languages: English, Dutch, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Luxembourgish, Lithuanian, Bulgarian, Cantonese, Estonian, Danish and Korean.

Our values

Tackling the climate crisis is our greatest mission.

We act with urgency.

Our curiosity fuels our growth.

We recognize that change is constant, and we find joy and power in exploration.

We’re rooted in diversity.

Just as ecosystems need biodiversity to thrive, our resiliency comes from our differences.

We care for each other.

We love the power of machines but we nurture each other as humans.

Trust is fundamental.

We assume the best in everyone, and we share ideas openly so that we have a positive impact.

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Use of AI in Our Hiring Process

We sometimes use AI tools to support parts of our hiring process, such as helping us manage applications more efficiently or ensuring job descriptions are clear and inclusive. But don’t worry, all hiring decisions are always made by people, not machines. Any data processed by AI is handled securely in line with GDPR and our Privacy Notice.