OverviewResponsibilities
Duties of the Geospatial Platform Lead will include the following:
- Platform architecture: own the architecture of the geospatial platform: cloud-native data (STAC, cloud-optimized formats), the serving and tiling layer (e.g., TiTiler), and the pipelines that scale model and map outputs.
- Data at scale: translate science outputs into reliable, versioned data products and interfaces for applications, partners, and the public.
- Standards & reliability: set engineering standards, including Infrastructure-as-Code on AWS; keep the platform reliable, secure, and interoperable; and own the roadmap for how it scales.
- Cross-team alignment: share goals, schemas, and delivery patterns with the teams that produce our data and analytics so that products and platform interfaces line up.
- Technical leadership: set technical direction for the cloud-native geospatial developers, coordinate across the Science, Applications, and Engineering teams, and mentor team members.
- Delivery: keep the platform's data discoverable, reproducible, and operationally reliable for the applications, APIs, and partners that consume it.
Qualifications
The Geospatial Platform Lead selected should have the following:
- Bachelor's or Master's in geospatial science, computer science, engineering, environmental or earth science, or a related field; or equivalent hands-on experience in place of a degree.
- Several years building and operating cloud-native geospatial or data platforms (roughly 5+ years, or equivalent depth of experience).
- Strong Python and production software practices, including Git, testing, and CI/CD.
- Hands-on AWS experience (our primary cloud) and Infrastructure-as-Code (e.g., Terraform or CloudFormation).
- Experience with cloud-native geospatial formats and serving (COG, GeoParquet, STAC/pgSTAC, TiTiler, or comparable).
- A track record of setting technical direction and mentoring engineers.
The Ideal Geospatial Platform Lead will have the following:
- Deep experience with the STAC ecosystem and dynamic tiling (pgSTAC, stac-fastapi, TiTiler).
- Distributed or large-scale processing (e.g., Dask, cloud batch) and high-performance computing.
- Background in hydrology, water resources, or environmental science.
- Experience delivering operational, regularly updated scientific products and public-facing tools.
- Experience owning a platform roadmap and engineering standards across multiple teams.
- Colorado Front Range presence for periodic in-person collaboration.
