Staff ML Engineer: Geospatial Climate Risk Modeling

Overstory; United States; Remote; USD 170,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Home office stipend

Coworking and ongoing education

Job summary

Overstory is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead scaling of our Wildfire Fuel Detection Model, combining satellite data with environmental science to map vegetation, fuel loads, and wildfire risk. You’ll shape modeling capabilities, balance scientific rigor with production needs, and mentor engineers across teams.

Based on Eastern time zones and a globally distributed team, you’ll drive architecture decisions, implement robust pipelines, and collaborate with data science, ML, and

Qualifications

• Experience thriving at the intersection of machine learning, geospatial data, and environmental science; deeply motivated by the opportunity to reduce wildfire risk through data‑driven insights
• 10+ years of experience designing and building production‑grade ML pipelines and systems
• Strong background in deep learning, computer vision, or remote sensing
• Skilled in designing end‑to‑end ML systems — from data ingestion and preprocessing to deployment and monitoring
• Hands‑on experience with frameworks like PyTorch, TensorFlow, XGBoost, or LightGBM, and data tools like Dask, Spark, or GeoPandas
• Familiarity with GCP and Vertex AI, or similar cloud‑based ML platforms
• Strong communication skills and ability to collaborate across technical and scientific domains
• Comfortable leading architectural discussions and mentoring other engineers

Responsibilities

• Architect and build advanced ML models to map and predict vegetation and fuel conditions across diverse geographies.
• Design and maintain robust data and feature pipelines for large‑scale geospatial and temporal data.
• Partner with wildfire science and product teams to define modeling objectives and evaluation metrics tied to real‑world impact.
• Build reproducible experimentation frameworks and model evaluation workflows.
• Scale models from research to production with a focus on performance, reliability, and explainability.
• Lead the evolution of ML systems, tooling, and processes — ensuring that our wildfire fuelscape models remain state‑of‑the‑art and maintainable.
• Collaborate with MLOps peers to streamline training, inference, and monitoring in production environments.

Skills

Machine learning pipelines

Geospatial data

Deep learning

End-to-end ML systems

PyTorch

TensorFlow

XGBoost

LightGBM

Dask

Spark

GeoPandas

GCP / Vertex AI

Communication

Mentoring

ML architecture

Tools

PyTorch

TensorFlow

XGBoost

LightGBM

Dask

Spark

GeoPandas

GCP Vertex AI

Job description

Overstory is seeking a Staff Machine Learning Engineer to lead scaling of our Wildfire Fuel Detection Model, combining satellite data with environmental science to map vegetation, fuel loads, and wildfire risk. You’ll shape modeling capabilities, balance scientific rigor with production needs, and mentor engineers across teams.

Based on Eastern time zones and a globally distributed team, you’ll drive architecture decisions, implement robust pipelines, and collaborate with data science, ML, and