Location: Remote, Africa

Full Time

Role Overview

The Earth Systems AI Lead Scientist will lead the scientific and technical design of next-generation physics-informed ML models for African climate and environmental systems—spanning weather prediction, hydrology, atmosphere–land interactions, and environmental forecasting.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead design and development of physics-informed ML models (PINNs, FNOs, operator learning, PDE-constrained models)
• Define scientific architecture ensuring physical consistency, numerical correctness, and robust validation
• Collaborate with geospatial and data engineering teams to integrate high-quality datasets (satellite, reanalysis, sensor)
• Conduct and publish research in open, reproducible ways—papers, technical reports, datasets
• Lead benchmarking, error analysis, and stress-testing of models
• Contribute to open-source tooling advancing scientific ML for Africa
• Mentor ML engineers and junior scientists on scientific rigor and model design

Requirements

• PhD or MSc in Atmospheric Science, Earth System Science, Climate Science, Applied Mathematics, or Physics
• 5+ years of experience in climate modeling, numerical modeling, or Earth system ML
• Strong ML background: PDE-based models, operator learning, physics-informed neural networks
• Proficiency with PyTorch or JAX, scientific computing libraries, and numerical simulation tools
• Experience with satellite or reanalysis datasets
• Comfortable communicating in English, both written and verbal

Preferred