Senior Wildfire Data Scientist

Senior Wildfire Data Scientist

We are looking for a Senior Wildfire Data Scientist to join our new Wildfire Product Team at Overstory. This is a full-stack product team focused on developing innovative wildfire-related products, with the ultimate goal of helping customers mitigate risk and improve resilience. 

In this role, you’ll be collaborating with a multidisciplinary team of software engineers, ML engineers, and product and design owners. The team will be working to mock and prototype solutions, and working with internal and external stakeholders to validate those products. While you’ll be able to leverage Overstory’s internal data layers and technical tooling, you’ll also be able to iterate quickly outside of the typical organizational structure.

A successful Wildfire Data Scientist will be able to take a leading role in ensuring that new products are released to customers. You’ll be an advocate for best practices in data science, geospatial analyses, and especially wildfire risk and resilience modeling. You’ll be able to leverage your experience to identify product opportunities, mitigate risks and uncertainty, and find the right balance between development and delivering.

While you’ll be the senior scientific representative for the Wildfire Product Teams, you’ll also be joining a robust community of science and science-adjacent team members. We have ML engineers and Data Scientists working on geospatial challenges associated with accurate canopy height maps, tree crown identification, tree health estimation, and other tasks.

As a quickly-growing, early-stage startup, you’ll also be able to make significant contributions to the direction and culture of our organization. You’ll shape how the Wildfire Product Team works within the organization, influence how we make core decisions about our platform and pipelines, and scope out impactful projects.

What you’ll do

• Develop new wildfire risk and resilience projects using machine learning, deep learning, or wildfire models.
• Provide scientific and wildfire domain expertise to help guide successful product development.
• Support and grow the scientific community within Overstory.

About you

• At least 5 years of commercial experience as a Data Scientist or Machine Learning Engineer, with deep data science skills and experience at early-stage or remote-first organizations
• Intermediate-level technical skills, especially with modern tech stacks including Python and its scientific libraries, Jupyter ecosystem, GCS or other cloud platforms, and best practices with code management and infrastructure
• Experience taking products from 0-1 with supporting product team, comfortable iterating on prototypes and using low-cost mocks and visualizations to develop ideas
• Advocate for products which account for and communicate probabilities or uncertainty, helping to build confidence with stakeholders
• Passionate about climate
• You are based in the GMT/ CET time zone. Open to US ET for those that are able to have significant overlap with GMT/ CET working hours. 

Differentiators

• Advanced degree in wildfire, climate, atmospheric, environmental sciences, or a related field
• Wildfire expert able to highlight opportunities and risks to guide the product development from a scientific perspective, collaborate with utility and technical experts to create compelling products
• Deeply familiar with modern approaches to wildfire risk modeling and their pros/cons, able to deliver thin slices of value with early modeling results while identifying future improvements, comfortable advocating for building vs buying
• Track record of taking at least one wildfire project from start to finish, or deeply supporting an existing suite of wildfire products
• Comfortable with deep learning or non-traditional approaches to modeling wildfire risk

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 62 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, Spain, France, Sweden 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.