Careers

About Outbreak Labs

At Outbreak Labs, we develop AI/ML-powered tools to forecast, monitor, and mitigate the impacts of pests and diseases impacting agricultural production. With 20-40% of global crops lost to pests and diseases annually, our solutions provide end-to-end capabilities for early detection, risk assessment, and outbreak management. Combining scientific rigor with practical applications, we empower industries to create data-driven strategies to protect agricultural production.

The Role

We're looking for a versatile and collaborative Geospatial Machine Learning Scientist with extensive experience in Earth observation, machine learning, remote sensing, computer vision and classification problems. You'll play a core role in developing models, identifying and exploring complex datasets, and communicating results that directly influence product and strategy. This position is ideal for someone who enjoys wearing multiple hats and is excited to work in a fast paced, early-stage start up environment.

We expect this role to operate at a senior level, with substantial ownership over technical direction and model development. A PhD or equivalent experience is required, along with a minimum of 3 years in the geospatial domain.

Key Responsibilities

• Design and implement classification and computer vision models to detect signals of disease infection, classify land cover types, and develop change detection algorithms from remote sensing imagery.
• Work with geospatial imagery at different spatial and temporal resolutions from drones and satellites (e.g., Sentinel, Landsat, commercial satellites, SAR).
• Analyse datasets (both large and small) from diverse sources (e.g., sensor networks, geospatial APIs, Street View, remote sensing).
• Proactively identify opportunities from emerging technologies, such as geospatial foundation models, to continually improve our technical approaches.
• Advise on ground truth data collection protocols and strategy to maximise the utility and efficiency of data collection for model training.
• Communicate findings clearly and regularly to both technical and non-technical team members.
• Work in a highly collaborative small team.

Required Skills & Qualifications

• Degree in a quantitative field - such as mathematics/statistics, data science, remote sensing, computer vision.
• PhD or equivalent industry experience.
• 3+ years experience in the geospatial domain working with geospatial imagery, computer vision techniques and classification algorithms (e.g., semantic segmentation, object detection, pixel classification, random forests, convolutional neural networks).
• Experience with cloud platforms or geospatial pipelines (e.g., Google Earth Engine).
• Strong programming skills in (preferably) Python and experience with geospatial libraries (e.g., GeoPandas, rasterio, GDAL, xarray, PyTorch, TensorFlow).
• Familiarity with fast and critical review of scientific literature.
• Comfortable working end-to-end - from ideation and assessing different technical approaches and sourcing datasets, to training models and iterating to improve the overall methodology.
• Great communication skills in explaining complex ideas to a range of audiences.
• Creative problem solving and willingness to explore unfamiliar tools and languages as needed.
• Excellent team working skills.

Desirable but not required

• Familiarity with data pipelines, MLOps, and cloud computing.
• Experience with weather and climate data.
• Experience with agricultural and/or plant disease context.
• Experience developing time series models.
• Contributions to open-source or academic publications.

How to Apply

Right to Work in the UK: Applicants must have the right to work in the UK at the time of application. Unfortunately, we are not able to provide visa sponsorship for this role.

Please provide your CV and a short supporting statement (approx. half a page) summarising why you are suited to the role, and how you meet the selection criteria.

To apply for this position, please email your CV and supporting statement to careers@outbreaklabs.co.