Senior Geospatial Machine Learning Engineer

Working to solve our climate crisis is the most important mission of our time, and the most exciting problem to be working on. Overstory’s mission is to help solve our climate crisis by providing real-time intelligence about the planet’s vegetation. In our first step toward this mission, we are applying machine learning to satellite imagery to track forests and vegetation. Today, we proudly partner with 40+ leading utilities worldwide, including 4 of the top 10 US utilities, to help reduce wildfire risk and increase grid reliability to prevent power outages.

We have already proven our business model and we’re all united behind our ambitious vision to scale up this model to help humanity and the planet. We closed a $14 million Series A, led by B Capital and welcoming The Nature Conservancy to our collective of climate-minded investors. This milestone includes additional investment and continued support from Convective Capital, Semapa Next, Bentley iTwin Ventures, Pale blue dot, CapitalT, Moxxie Ventures, and Overwater Ventures 

If you want to have a real impact and solve some of the world's most complex challenges with advanced technology, come work with our talented and passionate team. Overstory is a remote-first company, with people living all over the U.S. and Europe.

We are looking for a Senior Geospatial MLE to join the Vegetation Modeling team at Overstory. You’ll spend most of your time working within small groups on our team to experiment with, build, and improve algorithms for understanding how vegetation impacts our customers. In the past, we’ve developed solutions to coregister imagery, locate critical energy infrastructure, and identify tree species, heights, and health. Right now, we split our time between maintaining and improving these solutions, and developing new features to understand wildfire risk and assess the impact of different management strategies.

On our team, you’ll generally be working with satellite imagery and other geospatial datasets, and using machine learning or deep learning to analyze their contents. You’ll be regularly interfacing with our data and models through Python code, QGIS projects, and Dagster pipelines. You’ll thrive if you enjoy working with a cross-functional group of product, design, engineering, and platform team members, and being involved throughout the full scientific product lifecycle.

As a quickly-growing, early-stage startup, you’ll also be able to make significant contributions to the direction and culture of our organization. We collaborate closely with upstream teams responsible for ingesting data, and downstream teams that further refine or deliver those outputs to customers. You’ll be able to help shape how we work within our team and across the organization, influence how we make core decisions about our platform and pipelines, and scope out impactful projects.

What you’ll do

• Develop new vegetation intelligence products using standard geospatial Python libraries, as well as machine learning and deep learning tools
• Support existing products through data exploration, model improvements, and bugfixes, especially using QGIS, Dagster, Sentry, and Grafana
• Represent the team by leading projects and initiatives, being responsible for planning, execution, delivery, and ensuring the value of our contributions is clear to other stakeholders throughout the organization
• Build the tooling and processes necessary to measure the value and performance of our contributions, and help to make data-driven decisions about where we can have the greatest impact

About you

• At least 8 years of commercial experience as a Data Scientist or Machine Learning Engineer
• Advanced scientific Python experience, including numpy, scipy, scikit-learn, pandas
• Experience with geospatial or satellite data, and tooling such as gdal, rasterio, shapely, fiona, geopandas, QGIS
• Experience with deep learning algorithms, especially as applied to geospatial data, and tooling such as pytorch, tensorflow
• Experience leading small teams organized around projects or initiatives
• Passionate about climate
• Enjoy working in a remote first, fast-moving environment.
• You are based in the GMT/ CET time zone. Open to US ET for those that are able to have significant overlap with GMT/ CET working hours. 

Nice-to-haves

• Experience at early-stage startups and remote-first organizations
• An understanding of the challenges of working with geospatial data at scale, as well as possible solutions to those challenges
• Deep industry experience in a unique geospatial or forest science domain, such as working with SAR imagery or developing and supporting wildfire products

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, Indonesian, Cantonese, Estonian 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.