Senior Wildfire Data Scientist

Working to solve our climate crisis is the most important mission of our time, and the most exciting problem to be working on. Overstory’s mission is to help solve our climate crisis by providing real-time intelligence about the planet’s vegetation. In our first step toward this mission, we are applying machine learning to satellite imagery to track forests and vegetation. Today, we proudly partner with 40+ leading utilities worldwide, including 4 of the top 10 US utilities, to help reduce wildfire risk and increase grid reliability to prevent power outages.

If you want to have a real impact and solve some of the world's most complex challenges with advanced technology, come work with our talented and passionate team. Overstory is a remote-first company, with people living all over the U.S. and Europe.

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.

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, Indonesian, Cantonese, Estonian 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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We require a minimum of 4 hours of overlap with UK working hours. Therefore only candidates based in Europe, the UK, or the US East Coast will be considered for this position. Please note that in Europe we can currently only hire in the Netherlands, Estonia, Portugal, France and Sweden. Please mention where you are based: * Select...

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To be considered for this role, you must be legally authorized to work in the EU, UK, or US. Please note that Overstory is unable to provide visa sponsorship for this position. Are you legally authorized to work in the relevant country? * Select...