Overview:
Join an amazing team that is consistently recognized for our achievements and culture, including our most recent Forbes award of being one of America's Best Midsize Employers for 2026!
Position Summary:
The Principal Mitigation Scientist is responsible for driving Mercury’s evolving understanding of how patterns of home hardening and community scale fuel treatment influence wildfire entry, spread, and loss outcomes at the community level. The successful candidate will serve as the founding architect for the Mercury Mitigation Model working closely with the Sr. Director of Climate and Catastrophe Science and partners across Climate and Catastrophe Science, Underwriting, R&D, Pricing, Product, and Reinsurance.
This role requires deep expertise in community scale wildfire and WUI/urban fire behavior – including wind, topography, wildland and urban fuels, and the design and evaluation of fuel treatment (natural and urban fuels). The successful candidate will demonstrate expertise in home hardening programs – and hands on experience with operational wildfire models that combine vegetation spread, structure focused high-resolution urban fire modules, probabilistic ember generation and cellular automaton spread, and drought/wind frameworks along with downslope/Santa Ana indicators and fuel moisture indices. Experience with fire-pathway analysis is required to quantify how specific mitigation patterns change loss outcomes.
Working as part of a multidisciplinary team, the successful candidate will translate mitigation science into strategy that shows up in Mercury’s models, rate structures, underwriting rules, reinsurance analyses, and community commitments.
Responsibilities:
Essential Job Functions:
- Lead the design and development of the first generation Mercury Mitigation Modeling framework for California Wildfire, including the architecture that links hazard and loss outputs to mitigation configurations and decision ready business outputs.
- Define a clear, feasible roadmap for wildfire mitigation modeling that technical teams and business stakeholders believe is implementable.
- Lead and independently contribute to community scale fire pathways analysis to identify points of fire entry, key parcels and corridors, and reusable mitigation patterns.
- Partner with catastrophe and hazards scientists to translate their research into inputs for community spread frameworks, parcel and community level mitigation scores, and scenario design.
- Partner with hazards and catastrophe scientists to lead risk assessments using both third-party platforms (e.g., Verisk-AIR, Moody’s-RMS, KCC, etc.) and by developing proprietary models to improve loss assumptions and wildfire hazard views.
- Lead and independently contribute to the development of scientific datasets, event catalogs, and physical hazard frameworks tailored to insurance and reinsurance applications.
- Contribute to the analysis of extreme weather and climate datasets to produce climate-conditioned views of risk and forward-looking hazard projections.
- Contribute to technical validation of vendor risk scores and support internal benchmarking efforts using policy-data, claims, and other proprietary datasets.
- Lead cross-functional collaboration with Actuarial, Product, Underwriting, and R&D teams to ensure scientific rigor in pricing and capital allocation decisions.
- Drive internal education, white papers, and occasional public-facing insights to strengthen Mercury’s position as a leader in climate and catastrophe science.
- Lead and independently contribute to original research and synthesize findings from the broader scientific community.
- Lead and develop reports, presentations, and data visualizations to effectively communicate findings to technical and non-technical teammates.
- Lead and develop real-time risk analytics and detailed loss estimates to assess event impact.
- Remain at the forefront of scientific advancements in event simulation, hazard characterization, and high-resolution modeling of natural perils.
- Represent Mercury in external research collaborations, industry working groups, and technical forums.
Qualifications:
Education:
Minimum:
- A combination of education and experience is required with an emphasis in Wildland Fire Science, Fire Protection Engineering, Forest or Ecosystem Science, Atmospheric Science, Civil/Environmental Engineering, Applied Physics, Applied Mathematics, Computer Science, or a closely related field
Preferred:
- Ph.D. with an emphasis in high resolution fire behavior modeling
Experience:
Minimum:
- 10-Years or equivalent combination of education and experience. Advanced degrees may substitute for a portion of professional experience (graduate education typically counts toward 2–5 years of experience)
Preferred:
Knowledge and Skills:
Minimum:
- Expertise applying communityscale wildfire and WUI/urban fire behavior, with direct application to fire entry, spread pathways, ember exposure, and loss outcomes at parcel and neighborhood scales.
- Expertise designing, evaluating, or operating fueltreatment and homehardening programs (e.g., defensible space, fuel breaks, canopy management, roof/vent/deck/siding upgrades) and quantifying their impact on loss.
- Demonstrated proficiency applying operational wildfire models that combine Rothermelclass vegetation spread, structurefocused (Hamadastyle) urban fire modules on ~100 m grids, probabilistic ember generation and cellularautomaton spread, and wind/drought frameworks (e.g., NARR/HRRRclass winds, downslope/Santa Ana/Diablo indicators, fuelmoisture indices).
- Expertise applying advanced fire and pathwaymodeling tools such as Technosylvaclass simulators, WRFFire/WRFSFIRE, FlamMap/FARSITEstyle tools, Xyloplan, graphbased spread frameworks, AGNINARstyle approaches, or closely related systems.
- Experience within an insurance, reinsurance, catastrophe modeling, utility, or publicsector mitigation environment where wildfire/WUI analytics are tied to real operational or financial decisions.
- Proven ability to translate complex mitigation and firebehavior science into actionable frameworks that can be applied to pricing, underwriting, reinsurance, and community commitments (e.g., mitigation credits, eligibility rules, tailrisk narratives, communitytiering).
- Clear, concise communication skills with a track record of collaborating across multiple disciplines such as scientists, engineers, actuaries, product managers, and underwriters, and explaining uncertainty and tradeoffs to nontechnical stakeholders.
- Demonstrated proactive mindset with experience in strategic planning and a strong sense of ownership; capable of driving research and directing multiple project streams with competing priorities and delivering high-quality outputs independently.
- Proven to be a highly motivated, critical thinker with strong problemsolving skills and a proactive, ownershiporiented mindset; capable of strategic planning and independently driving multiple, competing project streams to highquality delivery.
- Demonstrated passion for building mitigationforward capabilities including crosssector collaboration with insurers, academia, vendors, utilities, labs, and public agencies.
- Evidenced commitment to ongoing learning on the latest wildfire/WUI research, mitigation science, modeling techniques, and regulatory/market trends.
- Strong collaboration orientation: able to lead partnerships with Actuarial, Product, Underwriting, CAT Pricing, R&D, and technology teams to ensure mitigation modeling directly informs business decisions.
Preferred:
- Experience working with largescale weather, climate, and hazard datasets relevant to wildfire and WUI (e.g., ERA5/NARR/HRRR, LANDFIRE, MTBS, GRIDMET, MODIS/VIIRS, FPAFOD, NCEI/Storm Events, local fuels and building datasets) to analyze physical drivers of ignition, spread, and urban conflagration.
- Experience with catastrophe modeling platforms (e.g., Verisk-AIR, Moody’s-RMS, KCC, etc), with ability to interpret and critique hazard and vulnerability assumptions.
- Experience developing statistical and scenario based modeling applied to natural hazards or mitigation (e.g., vulnerability/EP modeling, scenario catalogs, treatment vs. no treatment comparisons, before/after loss deltas).
- Programming and data analysis skills using Python and/or R, including experience with geospatial libraries and data pipelines (e.g., GeoPandas, xarray, rasterio, shapely, GDAL, PostGIS).
- Experience with catastrophe modeling platforms (e.g., Verisk/AIR, Moody’s RMS, KCC) and the ability to interpret, critique, and augment their wildfire hazard, vulnerability, secondary modifiers, and urban conflagration assumptions.
- Experience developing or refining wildfire hazard footprints, stochastic event sets, or scenario based mitigation views (e.g., before/after catalogs for specific communities) for insurance or utility applications.
- Quantitative skills and experience calculating AAL, EP curves, VaR/TVaR, tail metrics, and mitigation deltas (e.g., change in AAL/tail for specific treatment bundles or home hardening configurations).
- Experience with modern data and modeling tooling (e.g., SQL, NumPy, Pandas, SciPy, Dask, PySpark, xarray, cloud data platforms) for handling large geospatial and event datasets.
- Experience with advanced modeling techniques including artificial intelligence as applied to extreme weather datasets.
- Experience with downscaling techniques in dynamical weather models.
- Direct experience in catastrophe risk management (rating, underwriting, or reinsurance) where wildfire/WUI mitigation analytics materially influenced decisions.
About the Company:
Why choose a career at Mercury?
At Mercury, we have been guided by our purpose to help people reduce risk and overcome unexpected events for more than 60 years. We are one team with a common goal to help others. Everyone needs insurance and we can’t imagine a world without it.
Our team will encourage you to grow, make time to have fun, and work together to make great things happen. We embrace the strengths and values of each team member. We believe in having diverse perspectives where everyone is included, to serve customers from all walks of life.
We care about our people, and we mean it. We reward our talented professionals with a competitive salary, bonus potential, and a variety of benefits to help our team members reach their health, retirement, and professional goals.
Learn more about us here: https://www.mercuryinsurance.com/about/careers
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Perks and Benefits:
We offer many great benefits, including:
- Competitive compensation
- Flexibility to work from anywhere in the United States for most positions
- Paid time off (vacation time, sick time, 9 paid Company holidays, volunteer hours)
- Incentive bonus programs (potential for holiday bonus, referral bonus, and performance-based bonus)
- Medical, dental, vision, life, and pet insurance
- 401 (k) retirement savings plan with company match
- Engaging work environment
- Promotional opportunities
- Education assistance
- Professional and personal development opportunities
- Company recognition program
- Health and wellbeing resources, including free mental wellbeing therapy/coaching sessions, child and eldercare resources, and more
Mercury Insurance is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, status as a protected veteran, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state, or local law.
Pay Range:
USD $128,136.00 - USD $252,194.00 /Yr.
