Flood Data Scientist

Role highlights:

• Flood Data Scientist
• Location: Espoo, Finland or Valencia, Spain
• Department: Solutions
• Reports to: Director of Product Engineering
• Employment type: Permanent
• Workplace model: Hybrid
• Employment is subject to applicable security screening (incl. SUPO, where required)

Why this role matters:

ICEYE leverages proprietary satellite-derived observations and other auxiliary data to develop geospatial flood risk models, requiring strong hydrological expertise to extract reliable signals.

We need a Flood Data Scientist to bridge the gap between scientific rigor and engineering practicality. You will lead the effort to extract reliable hydrological signals from diverse, often noisy, geospatial datasets to support our expansion across the United States.

This is an outcome-oriented role: you are responsible for the quality of the features and the integrity of the labels that power our training pipelines. We expect a balance of an experimental mindset for feature discovery and a 'built-to-last' discipline for model validation. By utilizing AI-augmented workflows, you will maintain high-velocity delivery while ensuring our risk scores remain statistically meaningful and grounded in physical reality.

Who We Are

ICEYE delivers space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities to governments and allied nations. This includes sovereign and turnkey ISR missions leveraging ICEYE’s world-leading synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite technology, as well as access to data from the world’s largest SAR satellite constellation. These capabilities enable partners to detect and respond to critical changes anywhere on Earth with unprecedented speed and accuracy – day or night and in any weather, supported by ultra high-resolution imagery and high-frequency revisits.

As a trusted partner for defense, intelligence, security, and maritime domain awareness, ICEYE’s near real-time data creates a tactical advantage for mission-critical operations. Designed for dual use, the platform also serves civil protection and commercial users for natural-catastrophe intelligence, insurance, maritime monitoring (including oil-spill detection), and finance, contributing to global security and community resilience.

ICEYE is headquartered in Finland and operates globally across Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific. We have more than 900 employees, united by a shared vision: improving

Your day-to day responsibilities

• Feature Development: Translate environmental, terrain, and hydrological data into model-ready features grounded in physical process understanding; work closely with other hydrological subject matter experts to validate that signals reflect real-world behaviour

• Observation Quality: Assess, extend, and improve the quality of satellite-derived observation labels, investigating noise, bias, and coverage gaps, and designing labelling approaches that reflect confidence in the data
• Experimentation: Design and run experiments to understand what drives predictive performance; distinguish genuine signal from statistical artefact
• Physical Interpretability: Ensure model outputs are explicable in domain terms, the kind of scrutiny that holds up in front of scientists and domain experts, not just benchmarks
• Collaboration: Work closely with Data Engineers to define robust, scalable data and labeling workflows, and with ML Engineers to ensure features, labels, validation criteria, and model evaluation are scientifically rigorous and production-ready

Requirements:
Must haves:

• Education: Master's degree or higher in hydrology, geomorphology, geoscience, environmental science, civil engineering (water resources), or related quantitative field

• Experience: 5+ years of professional industry experience in data science with geospatial or environmental data, flood modeling, hydrology, climate risk, natural hazard assessment, or remote sensing analytics
• Domain Knowledge: Deep understanding of flood, extreme weather, and hydrological processes; able to reason about what the data represents physically, not just statistically. Familiarity with terrain analysis, catchment hydrology, or drainage network characterisation
• Geospatial Data: Hands-on experience working with raster and vector geospatial datasets, transforming raw environmental data into analytical features
• ML Proficiency: Solid experience with supervised learning for both geospatial and tabular data, training models, interpreting results, and running controlled experiments
• Python: Python-fluent; writes clean, testable analysis code, not just one-off notebooks
• Data Quality: Experience working with observational data that is noisy, spatially biased, or incomplete, and knowing how that affects model behaviour
• Modern Tooling: Pragmatic use of AI tooling (Cursor, Claude, Copilot) for data exploration and analysis acceleration

Nice to haves:

• Experience contributing to a shipped product, software engineering practices, version control discipline, code review, CI/CD, not just notebooks and papers
• Familiarity with US government geospatial datasets (FEMA, USGS, NOAA)
• PostGIS, AWS, or Databricks experience
• Remote sensing literacy, SAR, or optical environmental mapping
• Climate risk, insurance, or catastrophe modeling vocabulary

Application Process

• Recruiter screening
• Hiring manager interview
• Technical task
• Technical panel interview
• Final interview

Working at ICEYE

At ICEYE, you’ll join a diverse and highly engaged team united by the ambition to make the impossible possible. As a global scale-up, we combine speed and ambition with the opportunity to take real ownership from day one. Your growth, wellbeing, and success are a priority, with continuous professional development, training opportunities, and a culture where collaboration is how we win.

How We Work (Our Values)

Make the impossible possible: We set ambitious goals and stay calm under pressure. We bring grit, optimism, and ownership when things get hard, and we keep moving until we find a way.

• Be curious: Go deep, ask questions, listen carefully, and think critically. Understand the “why” behind decisions.
• See the big picture: Stay close to what’s happening across the company so you can make better decisions. Consider how your work affects others.
• Drive effective teamwork: Create psychological safety, invite different perspectives, and build inclusive teams. There are no bad questions.
• Act as one team: We win together. We match tasks to the right owner and stay agile as priorities shift.
• Have fun: What we do matters—and it should be enjoyable. Celebrate progress, take pride in results, and share the wins.

Benefits:
Our benefits are designed to support your health and wellbeing, at work and beyond. We keep improving them based on employee feedback, and offerings vary by location. Talent Acquisition will confirm what applies for this role and location during the process.

Our Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

We want ICEYE to be a place where people can be themselves and do great work. Different backgrounds and perspectives make us stronger, which is why we work to create an environment where people feel included, respected, and able to speak up. Whatever your background, we want you to bring your authentic self to the table.

We’re committed to fair, inclusive hiring and equal opportunity. Everyone is welcome to apply. If you need any adjustments or support during the recruitment process, tell us—we’ll do our best to help.

Apply now to start your ICEYE journey, and help us continue to make the impossible possible together. Read more about ICEYE and working with us at iceye.com.