About BurnBot
Wildfire has stopped being a season. BurnBot builds the machines that get ahead of it — remotely operated systems that apply and contain prescribed fire, and platforms that clear heavy fuel on terrain that isn’t safe for crews.
Our fleet is at work today for PG&E, CAL FIRE, the U.S. Forest Service, Caltrans, fire districts, and tribal nations across California, Oregon, and Washington — treating land at up to 40x the pace of conventional methods. We’re roboticists, engineers, and career fire practitioners. Hardware we design in South San Francisco is in the dirt within weeks, and the people who designed it are usually standing next to it.
Our machines have to see what a fire crew sees: where the fuel is, how heavy it is, where the ground drops away, where the fire line is, and where the people are. They have to do it through smoke, dust, glare, and at night.
You’ll own the perception stack that makes that possible — sensors, models, and the data engine behind them — on machines that work in real vegetation, not a parking lot.
The perception stack: camera, lidar, thermal, and radar — selection, placement, calibration, and fusion
Detection and segmentation of vegetation, terrain, obstacles, fire, and people, tuned for the conditions our machines actually work in
The data engine: what we collect in the field, how it gets labeled, and how quickly a failure becomes a training example
Evaluation you trust. Real metrics on real field data, and the honesty to say when a model isn’t ready.
Deployment onto embedded compute on the machine, within real latency and power budgets
5+ years building perception for robots or vehicles that operate outside a lab
Strong C++ and Python
Deep learning for detection and segmentation, and the judgment to know when classical methods are the better answer
Multi-sensor calibration and fusion, and comfort with the geometry underneath it
ROS or ROS 2, and the tooling around field data — bags, replay, visualization
Field debugging instincts. You’ve chased a bug that only reproduced outdoors
B.S. or higher in robotics, computer science, electrical engineering, or equivalent experience
Thermal or IR imaging experience
Lidar in vegetation — foliage penetration, ground segmentation, or point-cloud classification
Off-road or unstructured-environment perception (agriculture, mining, forestry, defense)
Active learning or data-engine tooling at scale
Wildland fire, forestry, or land management background
Job details are sourced from the employer's original posting.
Open job postingAbout the company
Burnbot is a company that provides services related to fire safety and prevention.