Senior Geospatial Data Engineer

Working to solve our climate crisis is the most important mission of our time, and the most exciting problem to be working on. Overstory’s mission is to help solve our climate crisis by providing real-time intelligence about the planet’s vegetation. In our first step toward this mission, we are applying machine learning to satellite imagery to track forests and vegetation, helping to reduce the risk of wildfires and power outages.

We have already proven our business model and we’re all united behind our ambitious vision to scale up this model to help humanity and the planet. We recently raised a round of funding, led by Convective Capital. Other investors include: B Capital Group, Moxxie Ventures, Capital T, Pale Blue Dot and many other climate-focussed investors.

If you want to have a real impact and solve some of the world's most complex challenges with advanced technology, come work with our talented and passionate team. Overstory is based in Amsterdam but we are a remote-first company, with people living all over the U.S. and Europe.

About the role

At Overstory, we process gigabytes of geospatial data every day and we are looking for a Geospatial Data Engineer to help us with that. We have built a robust cloud-based data-processing system and now we need to scale it up as our business grows.

You will help us develop our ETL pipelines and services. Working within our Data Platform team, you will work on systems that process satellite imagery and other data and make it available to our data science team. You will develop systems that download, process, store, and analyse geographical data. You will work with our current data sources and explore new ones. You will support our continued efforts on standardising and versioning our datasets and models. You’ll build prototypes to try things out quickly and robust data pipelines when it’s time to deploy to production.

About you

You are creative and curious. Your work is thorough and you pay attention to both the small details and the larger picture. You can work in a flexible manner, supporting the team in building prototypes quickly, and evolving these into scalable production-quality systems. Teamwork is at your core and you like to help others grow and succeed. You have a passion for the urgency of solving our climate crisis.

Requirements

• At least 5 years of commercial experience analysing, interpreting, and presenting geospatial data to meet client requirements.

• Good working knowledge of Python, SQL (especially PostGIS), and Git. 

• Experience working with satellite imagery or another remote sensing domain.

• Experience working in the cloud computing environment for large scale parallel distributed computing.

• Clear oral and written communication skills.

Nice-to-haves

• Familiarity with the Pangeo stack (Jupyter Hub, Dask, Xarray, Zarr, and HDF5 file formats) and/or other Python libraries for satellite imagery manipulation

• Experience with GDAL, rasterio, and raster operations 

• Working knowledge of a GIS software package such as QGIS or ArcGIS

• Knowledge of geospatial data indexing & storing such as STAC (Spatio-Temporal Asset Catalog)

What you get

• To be part of truly mission-driven work that reduces wildfires, protects earth’s natural resources and helps solve our climate crisis.

• Flexible working environment with a lot of autonomy. We build our work days around our lives, not the other way around.

• Other benefits like a remote working budget, an educational budget and time to develop new skills.

• To be surrounded by an excellent, vibrant, smart team who have each other's back and believe in a culture of openness, tolerance and respect.

• Equity and a competitive salary.

About our team

We are a group of 34 people from all over the world. Eleven nationalities are represented in our team. We work remotely from seven different countries and occasionally (optionally!) meet up for in-person collaboration.

Diversity & Inclusion

We place enormous value on diversity and inclusion with regards to gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, age, education, disability, disciplines and skillsets. We believe that the best ideas emerge when people with different perspectives and approaches work together on a problem.

We’re always looking to diversify our team further, but we’re proud of the fact that four out of the eight people on our leadership team are female or non-white males, 40% of the overall team identifies as female and 25% of the team are people of color. Our team speaks ten languages: English, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Luxembourgish, Indonesian and Cantonese.