Founding Wildfire Modeling Scientist — Remote

Coulson Group of Companies; Thermal (CA); Remote; USD 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

EmberWorks Sensing, the remote sensing arm of Coulson Aviation, seeks a founding Modeling Lead to own our fire behavior modeling efforts. You will shape approaches, validate outputs, and ensure results reach incident teams drawing on ORBIT data and external inputs.

You will collaborate with geospatial and platform engineers to deploy automated production pipelines, define compute needs for training/inference, and advance wildfire science with academic partners.

Qualifications

• Deep understanding of fire behavior models (e.g. ELMFIRE, WRF-SITE, FSIM) and underlying physics.
• Hands-on experience building and training ML or data-driven models on spatiotemporal data.
• Strong remote sensing background with raster imagery experience (thermal a plus).
• Proficiency with scientific geospatial programming stack and Git version control.
• Experience running model training on cloud compute with GPUs.
• Ability to work independently in a small R&D team and communicate decisions to engineers and ops staff.
• Bachelor's degree in a related field (fire science, atmospheric science, remote sensing, CS, environmental science).

Responsibilities

• Own the fire behavior modeling effort from integration to new methods.
• Build and implement models in an automated production pipeline using airborne thermal observations plus external data.
• Research and develop new approaches using empirical, physical, and ML methods.
• Define model validation criteria and diagnose issues in model or data.
• Specify compute requirements for training and inference and coordinate GPUs and distributed computing resources.
• Maintain connections with academic fire science communities and research partners.

Skills

Fire behavior models

ML on spatiotemporal data

Remote sensing

Geospatial programming stack

Python data stack

Cloud computing (GPU)

Independent work

Education

Bachelor's degree in fire science

Bachelor's degree in atmospheric science

Bachelor's degree in remote sensing

Bachelor's degree in computer science

Tools

Python xarray

GDAL

rasterio

PyTorch

Job description

EmberWorks Sensing, the remote sensing arm of Coulson Aviation, seeks a founding Modeling Lead to own our fire behavior modeling efforts. You will shape approaches, validate outputs, and ensure results reach incident teams drawing on ORBIT data and external inputs.

You will collaborate with geospatial and platform engineers to deploy automated production pipelines, define compute needs for training/inference, and advance wildfire science with academic partners.