Staff Machine Learning Engineer - Wildfire

Role & Team

As a Staff Machine Learning Engineer at Overstory, you will lead the development and scaling of our Wildfire Fuel Detection Model. This core engine powers how we understand vegetation structure, fuel loads, and wildfire risk from satellite and environmental data. You’ll help shape the next generation of Overstory’s modeling capabilities by combining cutting-edge ML techniques, large-scale geospatial data, and real-world domain expertise.

Reporting to our VP of Product Engineering, you’ll work closely with data scientists, ML engineers, and product teams to ensure our wildfire models are accurate, robust, and production-ready – balancing scientific rigor with practical engineering excellence. As a senior technical leader, you’ll mentor other engineers, drive architectural decisions, and define standards for modeling, experimentation, and deployment across Overstory.

Time zone requirement: Eastern North America (NST, AST, EST)

What You’ll Do

In collaboration with data, ML, and science colleagues, you will:

• 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 & Experience

• 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, and remote sensing