Senior ML Fire Scientist: Operational Wildfire Modeling

Coulson Aviation Inc; California; Remote; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

EmberWorks Sensors is seeking a founding member to lead fire behavior modeling, from data integration to new method development. You will shape modeling approaches, validate results, and ensure outputs reach incident teams using the data pipeline and cloud infrastructure.

You will join a small, hands-on team of geospatial and platform engineers, acting as the modeling expert and guiding decisions on what is learned and how it is applied in real-world wildfire operations.

Qualifications

• Deep understanding of fire behavior models and the underlying physics.
• Experience training ML or data-driven models on spatiotemporal data.
• Strong remote sensing background with raster imagery.
• Proficiency in Python geospatial stack (xarray, GDAL, rasterio, PyTorch) and Git.
• Experience with cloud training and GPU resources.
• Bachelor's degree in a related field.

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, drawing on empirical, physical, and machine learning methods as appropriate.
• Own model validation and interpretation: define what good looks like, detect bad outputs, and determine root causes.
• Define compute requirements for training and inference and work with platform engineers to set up GPU and distributed computing resources.
• Maintain connections with the academic fire science community and collaborate with research partners.

Skills

Fire modeling

Spatiotemporal ML

Remote sensing

Python stack

GPU compute

Git

Independent work

Education

Bachelor's degree

Job description

EmberWorks Sensors is seeking a founding member to lead fire behavior modeling, from data integration to new method development. You will shape modeling approaches, validate results, and ensure outputs reach incident teams using the data pipeline and cloud infrastructure.

You will join a small, hands-on team of geospatial and platform engineers, acting as the modeling expert and guiding decisions on what is learned and how it is applied in real-world wildfire operations.