Wildfire ML Scientist & Fire Behavior Expert

Coulson-Aviation; Thermal (CA); Remote; USD 120,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

EmberWorks is seeking a founding member to own the fire behavior modeling effort, from integration to new methods. You will shape approaches, validate results, and ensure outputs reach incident teams using geospatial data, cloud pipelines, and GPU resources.

Join a small, hands-on team of geospatial engineers and modelers who build data pipelines and cloud infrastructure, guiding technical direction and collaboration with researchers to improve wildfire intelligence in real time.

Qualifications

• Deep understanding of fire behavior models and underlying physics/mathematics.
• Hands-on experience building/training ML or data-driven models on spatiotemporal data.
• Strong remote sensing background with raster imagery (thermal a plus).
• Proficiency in geospatial programming stack (Python xarray, GDAL, rasterio, PyTorch) and Git.
• Experience running model training on cloud compute with GPUs.

Responsibilities

• Evaluate existing fire behavior modeling approaches and select the right fit for EmberWorks data.
• Build and implement models in an automated production pipeline using airborne thermal observations plus external data.
• Research and develop new modeling approaches, drawing on empirical, physical, and ML methods.
• Own model validation and interpretation: define success, detect bad outputs, diagnose data-model issues.
• Define compute requirements for training and inference and collaborate on GPU and distributed resources.
• Maintain connections with the academic fire science community and engage with research partners.

Skills

Fire behavior models

ML on spatiotemporal data

Remote sensing

Geospatial programming

Cloud training (GPU)

Education

Bachelor's degree in fire science / atmospheric science / remote sensing / CS / environmental science

Tools

Git

Job description

EmberWorks is seeking a founding member to own the fire behavior modeling effort, from integration to new methods. You will shape approaches, validate results, and ensure outputs reach incident teams using geospatial data, cloud pipelines, and GPU resources.

Join a small, hands-on team of geospatial engineers and modelers who build data pipelines and cloud infrastructure, guiding technical direction and collaboration with researchers to improve wildfire intelligence in real time.