Founding Wildfire ML Scientist - Remote Sensing & Fire Behavior

Coulson Aviation; Oregon; Hybrid; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

EmberWorks Sensing, the R&D arm of Coulson Aviation, seeks a modeling expert to own fire behavior models from integration to new methods. You will shape approaches, validate results, and ensure outputs reach incident teams leveraging our ORBIT platform.

You’ll join a small team of geospatial and platform engineers, building a data pipeline and cloud infrastructure to deliver data to models and inform operations. This is a founding role with rapid field testing.

Qualifications

• Deep understanding of fire behavior models and the underlying physics/mathematics.
• Hands-on experience building and training ML or data-driven models on spatiotemporal data.
• Strong remote sensing background with raster imagery experience.
• Proficiency in scientific geospatial programming stack (Python, xarray, GDAL, rasterio, PyTorch or similar).
• Familiarity with Git version control.

Responsibilities

• Evaluate existing fire behavior modeling approaches and select the right fit for our data.
• Build and implement models in an automated production pipeline using airborne thermal observations plus external fuel, weather, and terrain data.
• Research and develop new modeling approaches using empirical, physical, and machine learning methods.
• Own model validation and interpretation: define success criteria and detect issues in model or data.
• Define compute requirements for training and inference and coordinate with platform engineers for GPU/distributed computing.
• Maintain connections with academic fire science communities and partnerships.

Skills

Fire behavior modeling

ML on spatiotemporal data

Remote sensing

Geospatial programming

Git

Cloud-based training

Independent work

Bachelor's degree (related field)

Education

Bachelor's degree in fire science, atmospheric science, remote sensing, computer science, environmental science or related field

Tools

GDAL

rasterio

PyTorch

xarray

Git

Job description

EmberWorks Sensing, the R&D arm of Coulson Aviation, seeks a modeling expert to own fire behavior models from integration to new methods. You will shape approaches, validate results, and ensure outputs reach incident teams leveraging our ORBIT platform.

You’ll join a small team of geospatial and platform engineers, building a data pipeline and cloud infrastructure to deliver data to models and inform operations. This is a founding role with rapid field testing.