Geospatial Full-Stack Engineer
Location
Northern America
Posted
5 days ago
Salary
0
Seniority
Mid Level
No structured requirement data.
Job Description
Geospatial Full-Stack Engineer
Coulson Aviation
Role Description This is a full-stack geospatial software engineering position on a small, early-stage product team. The near-term focus is pipeline and platform — ingesting thermal imagery from airborne sensors, extracting fire perimeters, and delivering georeferenced outputs to agency GIS systems. You will work closely with the founding Geospatial Platform Engineer to build and own that stack. As the product matures and data accumulates, the role evolves toward ML model development — a first-of-its-kind fire spread model that improves with every flight. The team is fully remote, and this position will require some travel for team events and occasional stakeholder meetings. You will be the first person in this role, and you will define what it looks like. Areas of Ownership: - Geospatial Platform Development — own the build-out of the ORBIT Data Engine — an end-to-end pipeline that ingests thermal imagery from airborne sensors, extracts fire perimeters, and publishes georeferenced outputs to agency GIS systems (AGOL, WildfireSA, NIFC). - Front-End & Visualization — build and maintain the map-based interfaces and data visualizations that make ORBIT outputs accessible to agency users and flight crews. - Data architecture — design the training data schema, feature engineering pipeline, and validation dataset strategy that makes the fire spread model improvable over time. - ML Model Development — lead the development of a novel ML-based fire progression model that learns and improves as incident data accumulates — a trajectory that grows as the data foundation matures. - Other EmberWorks products or programs – contribute ML or geospatial engineering capacity to other program tracks as assigned. Qualifications - Geospatial fluency — comfortable with raster and vector data pipelines; PostGIS, GDAL, cloud-native geospatial formats (GeoParquet, COG), and GIS publishing (AGOL, OGC services). - Remote sensing experience — IR or multispectral imagery processing; radiometric data, thermal thresholding, or equivalent raster analysis in an applied context. - ML curiosity and aptitude — you don’t need to have shipped a production ML model, but you need to understand the fundamentals and be genuinely motivated to build toward it. - Cloud infrastructure comfort — GCP or AWS; experience building and operating data pipelines using managed services (Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, or equivalent). - Communication — you can explain model tradeoffs and data quality issues to non-technical stakeholders without losing the details that matter. - Self-direction — this role does not have a playbook; you will write it. Requirements - Fire domain familiarity — any exposure to fire behavior models (FARSITE, FlamMap, PHOENIX), fire weather data, or operational fire context; you don’t need to be an FBAN but you need to learn fast. - Data assimilation or ensemble methods — familiarity with frameworks like WRF-SFIRE, EnKF-FARSITE, or similar; understanding of how observational data gets assimilated into running model states. - Hardware-adjacent experience — familiarity with configuring or troubleshooting sensor hardware, working with raw sensor output, or integrating embedded systems into a data pipeline. - Photogrammetry or structure-from-motion experience — familiarity with georeferencing, orthorectification, or photogrammetric workflows. - Preference for west coast location. Benefits We support diversity, equity, and a workplace that is free from harassment and discrimination. We are committed to providing accommodation for people with disabilities. If you require accommodation through any element of the job application process, please notify us and we will work with you to meet your needs.
Related Guides
Related Categories
Related Job Pages
More GIS Jobs
• Use your drone flight and GIS knowledge to help our customers resolve any issues • Rapidly and accurately resolve customer tickets via email, chat, and phone-based support in Zendesk • Look for ways to improve processes and tools to help us scale our global support team • Continue growing and refining our knowledge base by contributing to both internal and external documentation • Use your active listening, customer empathy, and de-escalation skills to maintain and grow customer relationships • Advocate for our customers by collaborating directly with Engineering, Product Management, and our UX team on customer pain points or other product improvements
• Design, develop, and maintain enterprise-level Web GIS applications and geospatial services. • Build interactive web mapping applications for visualization, analysis, and management of spatial data. • Develop and integrate GIS services using industry-standard geospatial web services and APIs. • Work with vector, raster, and tiled geospatial datasets to support business and operational requirements. • Implement spatial data processing workflows and optimize geospatial data storage and retrieval. • Develop and maintain integrations with GIS platforms, databases, and external systems. • Perform spatial analysis, geoprocessing, and map rendering for web-based GIS solutions. • Ensure application scalability, performance, security, and reliability. • Collaborate with GIS analysts, business stakeholders, and development teams to gather requirements and deliver solutions. • Troubleshoot and resolve issues related to geospatial data, services, and application functionality. • Create technical documentation and support deployment, testing, and maintenance activities.
• Drive geospatial data and tooling needs for a large-scale project • Source geospatial data in many modalities • Build geospatial data automation and tooling in an AI/ML pipeline for new applications • Research and gather data for specific regions from different sources, including imagery and other raster data, vector data, and point clouds • Find and acquire data from free/public domain sources, as well as form and drive partnerships with commercial data providers • Manage the coverage, freshness, quality, and cost of the sourced data • Build and use automated tools (e.g., incorporating open source libraries like GDAL and in-house tools) to clean, resize, reformat, and align data for internal customers • Responsible for tooling to automatically postprocess the output of a geospatial AI/ML pipeline for use by other teams • Partner with AI/ML teams to supply diverse data they need for building new machine learning models • Collaborate with Pipeline and Product teams to ensure they have the necessary data required.
• Contribute to driving geospatial data and tooling needs for a large-scale project • be part of a team of GIS engineers responsible for sourcing geospatial data in many modalities • build geospatial data automation and tooling in an AI/ML pipeline for new applications • research and gather data for specific regions from different sources, including imagery and other raster data, vector data, and point clouds • find and acquire data from free/public domain sources, and participate in partnerships with commercial data providers • assist in managing the coverage, freshness, quality, and cost of the sourced data • build and use automated tools (e.g., incorporating open source libraries like GDAL and in-house tools) to clean, resize, reformat, and align it so it’s ready for internal customers to use • responsible for tooling to automatically postprocess the output of a geospatial AI/ML pipeline for use by other teams • work closely with different teams in our organization and partner with the AI/ML teams to supply diverse data they need for building new machine learning models
