Rivith Uyangoda
In roleRivith founded Fire Aware to make authoritative wildfire and smoke intelligence legible to the people who actually need it — residents, travellers, and small emergency teams in the BC Interior. He owns product direction, the scientific modelling pipeline, the platform engineering, and community partnerships end to end.
Roles Currently Held
Every discipline below is, today, covered by the founder. That is the honest headcount — these are the functions that keep the platform running, not separate hires pretending to exist.
Founder, CEO & Product Strategy
Owns product direction, roadmap, pricing, legal and privacy posture, and the decision of what Fire Aware will and will not claim it can do.
Wildfire Science & Fire Behaviour
Maintains the fire behaviour logic: CFFDRS and Fire Weather Index interpretation, fuel moisture handling, spread-risk scoring, and how BCWS perimeter and status data is read.
Meteorology, Smoke & Air Quality
Handles ECCC forecast and radar feeds, lightning-strike correlation, woodsmoke and PM2.5 calibration, smoke-drift interpretation, and valley-topography effects in the BC Interior.
Geospatial & Satellite Data Engineering
Builds the ingestion and rendering pipeline for NASA FIRMS VIIRS/MODIS thermal anomalies, BCWS perimeters, DriveBC cameras, and the interactive map and terrain layers.
Platform & Full-Stack Development
Writes and maintains the whole stack: Node/Express APIs, the public frontend, the data-export endpoints, alerting and notification plumbing, and the test suite that guards it.
AI & Detection Engineering
Builds the detection and classification logic: thermal hotspot triage, smoke and flame classification from camera and satellite imagery, false-positive suppression, and risk scoring.
Site Reliability, Security & Operations
Runs deployments, uptime monitoring, rate limiting, OAuth and API-key access control, failover between upstream data providers, and the open-data export guarantees.
Community Partnerships & Emergency Liaison
Coordinates with regional fire departments, Emergency Support Services contacts, First Nations leadership, and municipal staff to shape what the platform actually warns people about.
Support, Documentation & Communications
Answers support tickets, writes the user guides and changelog, maintains the FAQ and API documentation, and handles external communication and incident messaging.
Open Positions — We're Recruiting
These are the roles we want to hand off as funding and volunteer capacity allow. Engagement is flexible: contract, part-time, advisory, or volunteer/collaboration — tell us what works for you and we will be straight with you about what we can currently offer.
Fire Behaviour Scientist / Wildfire Ecologist
Review and harden the fire behaviour models — CFFDRS equations, fuel moisture assumptions, and Interior BC ecosystem calibration — and challenge the numbers we publish before the public sees them.
Meteorologist / Smoke Dispersion Analyst
Own smoke plume and air-quality interpretation: dry lightning, valley inversions, dispersion modelling, and improving how confidently we can predict smoke arriving in a given community.
Geospatial Engineer — Satellite & GIS Pipelines
Take over the raster and vector pipelines: FIRMS thermal anomaly ingestion, BCWS perimeter normalisation, DriveBC corridor data, and faster, leaner map tile delivery.
Machine Learning Engineer — Detection & False Positives
Raise detection precision on optical and thermal imagery: smoke versus cloud versus haze discrimination, industrial heat-source rejection, and measurable accuracy reporting.
Site Reliability / DevOps Engineer
Share on-call and hardening work: uptime and alerting, queue and poller resilience, secret and key rotation, dependency and security patching, and honest status reporting.
Indigenous & Community Liaison — WUI Coordinator
Build the relationships and the protocol: engaging First Nations and rural fire departments, incorporating cultural fire knowledge, and making sure alerts respect and reach the territories they cover.
Emergency Preparedness Coordinator
Connect the platform to real evacuation practice: ESS workflows, reception-centre needs, neighbourhood preparedness outreach, and after-action feedback on how alerts actually performed.
Grants, Partnerships & Fundraising Lead
This role funds the others. Find and write grants, shape municipal and research partnerships, and build the case for keeping wildfire intelligence free and open to the public.
Not seeing your role? Apply anyway.
We also welcome academic researchers, open-source contributors, sensor hosts, and regional emergency planners who would rather collaborate than be hired.