Geospatial Services Engineer

We are seeking a software engineer to develop geospatial data services and advance open-source geospatial technologies. We are a major contributor to efforts in our industry to promote open community standards such as STAC, OGC API, cloud-native geospatial formats, and Kubernetes to enable more research and applications to benefit from Earth data. We share this agenda with our partners, the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), European Space Agency (ESA), and major cloud providers. We are looking to grow our team in Europe to connect the global community and contribute to impactful projects for ESA and other leading organizations.

Your primary contribution will be to design and implement geospatial services with open-source technologies like eoAPI (STAC, dynamic tiling) and up-stream changes in these libraries required to serve our client’s applications. You should be comfortable communicating ideas about emerging and evolving geospatial technologies and software architecture with colleagues at DevSeed and partners. With your expertise, we can unlock the rich information stored in the massive and growing Earth data collections and enable earth scientists to work smarter and faster, giving us all better insight into our changing planet.

Development Seed is a unique and rewarding place to do this work. Over the past two decades, we have honed our approach to stewarding projects from opportunity to successful, impactful products. Our partners are working on exciting and important problems. Our technical teams are built of curious, empathetic people with high intrinsic motivation and individual agency. We open-source a lot of our work, invest heavily in R&D that drives the field, and regularly reinvent the nature of our work.

This is a remote-first position; you must be located in and authorized to work in one of the ESA member states. You will be working on our EU-based projects while also collaborating with our global team.

As a Geospatial Services Engineer, you will:

• Write clean code and design clean architectures for geospatial data services
• Work with earth science and cloud infrastructure communities to develop best practices and tools
• Be an advocate for cloud-optimized data formats and services
• Work in the open. We support open source, open data, and open science and take pride in our impact. As part of the Development Seed team, we encourage you to talk about your work through blogging and presentations at conferences, seminars, and workshops.

To be successful in this role, you will leverage your skills in building quality services that are consistent and accurately address requirements. Most of your time will be spent writing code and documentation. An ideal candidate has experience with Python for data services and Kubernetes and is excited to learn new tools, services, and approaches.

About you

Requirements:

• Minimum of 3 years professional experience in collaborative software development
• Experience with developing APIs in Python (e.g. using FastAPI)
• Experience using containerization and orchestration to create scalable deployments with Docker and Kubernetes
• Experience with using open-source geospatial technologies (implementations of STAC and OGC API standards)
• An interest in service-oriented architecture
• Experience with Git, GitHub, and collaborative code development
• Ability to work together and independently in a distributed, remote setting
• Located and authorized to work in an ESA member state

Nice to have:

• Contributed to open-source geospatial technologies
• Familiarity with cloud-optimized data formats, including Zarr, COG, GeoParquet, and n-dimensional data handling in the cloud
• Willingness to communicate with stakeholders

As a Development Seed team member, you:

• Collaborate — Working as a team makes us stronger than any individual developer. You write clear GitHub tickets and communicate effectively on Slack and in person.
• Learn — We constantly evolve our technology stack and techniques to deliver the best work to our partners. You don't need to know any particular language or framework upfront, but demonstrate that you're able and excited to learn new building methods.
• Code — You write code that focuses on performance and maintainability. You also write detailed documentation before and after writing code.
• Care about the world and believe that we can do better — Social change is the foundation of everything we do. You are impatient about solving the world’s toughest challenges.

Are you not sure you tick all the boxes? We encourage you to apply. We have a culture of learning, and if this job description sounds exciting, we’d love to hear from you.

We have a comprehensive 5 step hiring process, designed to be thorough and engaging to ensure that you and our team have a clear understanding of how we can succeed together:

1. Review application
2. Introductory interview to get to know each other
3. Technical interview to talk about your technical skills, prior experience, and answer hypothetical questions about how you’d approach future projects
4. Team fit interview to align with our team's culture and your longer term career goals
5. Paid full day virtual interview activity for you to collaborate directly with our team members

Development Seed earnestly embraces diversity and equal opportunity. We are committed to building a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills. The more inclusive we are, the better our work will be.

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