Senior Data Scientist, Wildfire Risk & Remote Sensing

Overstory; San Diego (CA); On-site; USD 140,000 - 220,000; Full time

Job summary

Overstory is seeking a Staff Data Scientist, Wildfire to lead the scientific foundation of the Fuel Detection Model, translating satellite and environmental data into wildfire risk insights. You’ll define accuracy, validate methods, and ensure fire science grounding across engineering and product teams.

You will collaborate with ML engineers and researchers to advance open scientific questions with real-world impact, mentoring others while shaping how utilities prevent catastrophic wildfires.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of applied research or data science experience in wildfire science, fire ecology, forestry, remote sensing, atmospheric science, or related field.
• Deep expertise in remote sensing and geospatial analysis with satellite imagery and large environmental datasets.
• Strong Python ML skills with GeoPandas, scikit-learn, PyTorch or XGBoost.
• Experience designing validation studies and evaluation frameworks for geospatial models.
• Excellent communication to explain complex science to technical and non-technical audiences.

Responsibilities

• Lead research into estimating vegetation structure, fuel conditions, and wildfire risk from satellite, LiDAR, and environmental data across geographies.
• Design rigorous validation methodologies, ground-truth strategies, uncertainty quantification, and error analysis tied to real-world impact.
• Prototype and refine ML modeling approaches, partnering with ML engineers to productionize them.
• Integrate established fire science with data-driven methods.
• Define scientific standards for experimentation, reproducibility, and model interpretability.
• Communicate findings clearly to engineers, product teams, customers, and wildfire science community.
• Mentor ML engineers on scientific methodology and domain reasoning.

Skills

Remote sensing

Geospatial analysis

Python

Machine learning

Communication

Tools

GeoPandas

scikit-learn

PyTorch

XGBoost

Job description

Overstory is seeking a Staff Data Scientist, Wildfire to lead the scientific foundation of the Fuel Detection Model, translating satellite and environmental data into wildfire risk insights. You’ll define accuracy, validate methods, and ensure fire science grounding across engineering and product teams.

You will collaborate with ML engineers and researchers to advance open scientific questions with real-world impact, mentoring others while shaping how utilities prevent catastrophic wildfires.