Staff Data Scientist, Wildfire & Vegetation Analytics

Overstory; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 200,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote work

Home office stipend

Education budgets

Flexible work environment

Job summary

Overstory is building an AI-powered platform that uses satellite imagery to map vegetation structure, fuels, and wildfire risk for utilities. As a Staff Data Scientist, Wildfire, you will lead the scientific foundation of our Fuel Detection Model and guide methods grounded in fire science and remote sensing.

You will work alongside ML engineers and a product team to define accuracy, validation, and production-ready modeling decisions with real-world impact for resilient grids.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of applied research or data science in wildfire, forestry, remote sensing or related field.
• Deep expertise in remote sensing and geospatial analysis with large datasets.
• Strong Python ML skills using GeoPandas, scikit-learn, PyTorch or XGBoost.
• Experience designing validation studies and evaluation frameworks.
• Excellent communication, able to present complex work clearly.

Responsibilities

• Lead research to estimate vegetation structure, fuel, and wildfire risk from satellite, LiDAR, and environmental data.
• Design validation, ground-truth strategies, uncertainty quantification, and error analysis.
• Prototype ML approaches and collaborate with ML engineers for production deployment.
• Integrate fire science with data-driven methods and ensure reproducibility.
• Define modeling standards and communicate findings to engineers and customers.
• Mentor ML engineers on scientific methodology and domain reasoning.

Skills

Remote sensing

Geospatial analysis

Python

Statistical modeling

Communication skills

Tools

GeoPandas

scikit-learn

PyTorch

XGBoost

Job description

Overstory is building an AI-powered platform that uses satellite imagery to map vegetation structure, fuels, and wildfire risk for utilities. As a Staff Data Scientist, Wildfire, you will lead the scientific foundation of our Fuel Detection Model and guide methods grounded in fire science and remote sensing.

You will work alongside ML engineers and a product team to define accuracy, validation, and production-ready modeling decisions with real-world impact for resilient grids.