Machine Learning Scientist – Wildfire

Posted 8hrs ago

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Job Description

Machine Learning Wildfire Scientist owning fire behavior modeling for EmberWorks Sensing's ORBIT airborne thermal sensing platform. Building validated production models from wildfire observations and geospatial data.

Responsibilities:

  • Own EmberWorks' fire behavior modeling effort from first integration to new methods
  • Evaluate existing fire behavior modeling approaches and select the right fit for available 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 using empirical, physical, and machine learning methods as appropriate
  • Own model validation and interpretation by defining quality criteria, detecting bad outputs, and determining whether issues originate in the model or upstream data
  • Define compute requirements for training and inference
  • Work with the platform engineer to establish GPU and distributed computing resources and an efficient remote workflow
  • Maintain connections with the academic fire science community
  • Help EmberWorks engage with research partners
  • Shape modeling approaches, validation methods, and how outputs reach users

Requirements:

  • Deep understanding of fire behavior models such as ELMFIRE, WRF-SITE, and FSIM, including underlying physics and math
  • Hands-on experience building and training machine learning or data-driven models on spatiotemporal data
  • Strong remote sensing background, including raster imagery; thermal experience is a strong plus
  • Proficiency in scientific geospatial programming stack, such as Python, xarray, GDAL, rasterio, and PyTorch or similar
  • Familiarity with Git-based version control
  • Experience running model training on cloud compute, including GPU resources
  • Ability to work independently in a small R&D team and explain modeling decisions to engineers and operations staff
  • Bachelor's degree in fire science, atmospheric science, remote sensing, computer science, environmental science, or a related field
  • Proven experience delivering at least one wildfire project end to end, or sustained, in-depth support of an established wildfire product suite
  • Active ties to academic or government fire research groups
  • Experience with data assimilation or physics-informed ML
  • Knowledge of optics and radiometry, including thermal sensor calibration
  • Familiarity with wildland fire operations and the agencies and tools that support them
  • Advanced degree and research in a relevant field, or equivalent applied experience

Benefits:

  • Founding position on a small team doing new work with unique airborne fire observation data
  • Work tested on active fires rather than only benchmark datasets
  • Direct access to leadership
  • Room to set technical direction