Hydrological Modeller in Bristol

Working location: Bristol office, London office or hybrid (quarterly visits to the Bristol office)

Reporting to: Nans Addor, Head of Hydroclimate Science

About Fathom and the Hydroclimate team

Fathom is a leader in the climate and flood risk intelligence space. Our products are used by leaders in engineering, international development, finance, government, insurance and NGOs across the globe. Fathom is part of the Swiss Re group, strengthening our commitment to become the gold standard in the provision of flood risk intelligence. Fathom thrives by developing novel methods, implementing state‑of‑the‑art research, and contributing to the scientific community through peer‑reviewed publications.

To take our modelling to the next level, we are looking for a Hydrological Modeller to join our Hydroclimate team. This team uses a blend of process‑based models and ML approaches to generate unprecedented floods across the globe, capture climate changes impacts and embed them in our products. We use process understanding, large‑scale models and datasets to capture the hydroclimate dynamics shaping flood risk globally. The team progresses towards long term goals through fast iteration cycles, generating cutting‑edge products along the way. We do not work on disparate siloed projects, we build together a connected modelling framework that drives our flood hazard maps and CAT model. This position is a permanent position. This is a unique opportunity to work across diverse and impactful projects, collaborating closely with domain experts, including partners from academia and industry.

What you'll do

• Design and implement innovative approaches to simulate river floods, generate unprecedented events and evaluate their realism, and incorporate climate change impacts into our products.
• Setup, run and evaluate process‑based hydrological models over regional to global domains, connecting seamlessly with our climate, coastal and hydraulic models.
• Use ML to enhance and speed up our modelling, working closely with our ML engineers and software engineers to develop and deploy models that scale.
• Use data from large samples of catchments to explore and isolate hydrological processes driving flood risk and capture them in our models.
• Work at the interface between academia and industry, present at scientific conferences and forge links with academic partners.
• Interact with our colleagues at Swiss Re, industry partners and clients to understand the industry we are part of and design products that meet their needs.

We're looking for someone with

• A PhD or similar experience in computational hydrology, land‑surface modelling, climate science or similar field.
• Demonstrated experience running large‑scale hydrological models and working in HPC environments.
• Strong understanding of the processes driving flood risk over large domains and familiarity with large‑scale open datasets characterising hydroclimate dynamics and landscape attributes.
• Fluency in Python and familiarity with software development best practices, including version control (Git/GitHub).
• A pragmatic approach to numerical problem‑solving and strong innovation skills, ideally demonstrated through academic or project work, and strong communication skills.
• An inspiring and supportive team player with an open mind.

Great to have but not essential

• Experience with Delatres HydroMT and Wflow hydrological model.
• Experience with distributed ML‑based hydrological modeling.
• Experience in related fields transferable to computational hydrology.