Senior Wildfire Data Scientist

Powerhouse; United Kingdom; Remote; GBP 50,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job description

Remote - EU, UK, US East/Central/Mountain

The climate crisis is the defining challenge of our time—but it’s also the greatest opportunity for innovation, and a challenge we’re proud to take on. At Overstory, we’re harnessing cutting-edge technology to enable a resilient electrical grid that keeps communities thriving as our world changes.

The grid is the backbone of life as we know it. It powers hospitals, keeps food fresh, and ensures communities stay connected. But extreme weather, aging infrastructure, and growing wildfire risks are putting this critical system under pressure. All of this combined makes the electric utility industry the greatest opportunity for tackling climate change.

One of the leading causes of catastrophic wildfires and power outages? Trees and brush coming into contact with power lines.

That’s where we help. At Overstory, we use AI and advanced satellite imagery to pinpoint and prioritize vegetation risks before they materialize. By giving utilities critical analysis on those risks, we’re helping prevent outages, reduce wildfire risks, and accelerate the transition to a safer, more resilient grid.

We are looking for a Senior Wildfire Data Scientist to join our new Wildfire Product Team at Overstory. This is a full-stack product team focused on developing innovative wildfire-related products, with the ultimate goal of helping customers mitigate risk and improve resilience.

In this role, you’ll be collaborating with a multidisciplinary team of software engineers, ML engineers, and product and design owners. The team will be working to mock and prototype solutions, and working with internal and external stakeholders to validate those products. While you’ll be able to leverage Overstory’s internal data layers and technical tooling, you’ll also be able to iterate quickly outside of the typical organizational structure.

A successful Wildfire Data Scientist will be able to take a leading role in ensuring that new products are released to customers. You’ll be an advocate for best practices in data science, geospatial analyses, and especially wildfire risk and resilience modeling. You’ll be able to leverage your experience to identify product opportunities, mitigate risks and uncertainty, and find the right balance between development and delivering.

What you’ll do

• Develop new wildfire risk and resilience projects using machine learning, deep learning, or wildfire models.
• Provide scientific and wildfire domain expertise to help guide successful product development.
• Support and grow the scientific community within Overstory.

About you

• At least 5 years of commercial experience as a Data Scientist or Machine Learning Engineer, with deep data science skills and experience at early-stage or remote-first organizations
• Intermediate-level technical skills, especially with modern tech stacks including Python and its scientific libraries, Jupyter ecosystem, GCS or other cloud platforms, and best practices with code management and infrastructure
• Experience taking products from 0-1 with supporting product team, comfortable iterating on prototypes and using low-cost mocks and visualizations to develop ideas
• Advocate for products which account for and communicate probabilities or uncertainty, helping to build confidence with stakeholders
• Passionate about climate
• You are based in of the following locations: EU, UK, US East/Central/Mountain

Differentiators

• Advanced degree in wildfire, climate, atmospheric, environmental sciences, or a related field
• Wildfire expert able to highlight opportunities and risks to guide the product development from a scientific perspective, collaborate with utility and technical experts to create compelling products
• Deeply familiar with modern approaches to wildfire risk modeling and their pros/cons, able to deliver thin slices of value with early modeling results while identifying future improvements, comfortable advocating for building vs buying
• Track record of taking at least one wildfire project from start to finish, or deeply supporting an existing suite of wildfire products
• Comfortable with deep learning or non-traditional approaches to modeling wildfire risk

What you get

• To be part of truly mission-driven work that reduces wildfires, protects earth’s natural resources and helps solve our climate crisis.
• Flexible working environment with a lot of autonomy. We build our work days around our lives, not the other way around.
• Other benefits like a remote working budget, an educational budget and time to develop new skills.
• To be surrounded by an excellent, vibrant, smart team who have each other's back and believe in a culture of openness, tolerance and respect.
• Equity and a competitive salary.

About our team

We are a group of 62 people from all over the world. Fifteen nationalities are represented in our team. We work remotely from nine different countries and we are looking for candidates that are also living and working in one of these countries: United States, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Ireland, Estonia, Portugal, Spain, France, Sweden and Canada. We meet up once a year in-person for our unforgettable team gathering event. We also offer the option to occasionally meet up for in-person collaboration.

Diversity & Inclusion

We place enormous value on diversity and inclusion and strive to continually bring in people of all genders, races, creeds, ethnicities, abilities and backgrounds. We believe that the best ideas emerge when people with different perspectives and approaches work together on a problem.

We’re always looking to diversify our team further, but we’re proud of the fact that four out of the nine people on our leadership team are female, 46% of the overall team are female and 20% of the team are people of color. Our team speaks fifteen languages: English, Dutch, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Luxembourgish, Lithuanian, Bulgarian, Cantonese, Estonian, Danish and Korean.

Our values

Tackling the climate crisis is our greatest mission.

We act with urgency.

Our curiosity fuels our growth.

We recognize that change is constant, and we find joy and power in exploration.

We’re rooted in diversity.

Just as ecosystems need biodiversity to thrive, our resiliency comes from our differences.

We care for each other.

We love the power of machines but we nurture each other as humans.

Trust is fundamental.

We assume the best in everyone, and we share ideas openly so that we have a positive impact.