What are the responsibilities and job description for the GIS Engineer position at ASCENDING?
Location: Fully Remote within the US, Preferably East Coast
USC Only
We are seeking an experienced GIS Data Engineer to join our team. The ideal candidate will be a seasoned Postgres database engineer with leadership capabilities, skilled in supporting open-source and ESRI technologies in both front-end and back-end environments. A strong background in working with geospatial scientific data in an analytic capacity is highly desirable.
Required Qualifications:
- Experience:
- 12 years of overall professional experience.
- 8 years working with open-source and COTS GIS software and databases (e.g., QGIS, ArcGIS, PostGIS, SDE) and their associated APIs or interfaces.
- Technical Expertise:
- Knowledge of best practices in data management, standards, quality, and interoperability.
- Proven ability to manage, convert, and maintain large volumes of vector geodata (e.g., shapefiles, geospatial databases, GeoJSON, GeoPackage, etc.).
- Hands-on experience maintaining, querying, and performing spatial analysis in PostGIS spatial databases and/or SQL Server Spatial/Oracle Spatial.
- Skilled in modeling, manipulating, processing, optimizing, and extracting value from large, complex, disconnected GIS datasets.
- Proficiency in one or more scripting languages (e.g., Python, R) with demonstrated experience in data-centric environments.
- Geospatial Big Data:
- Experience with geospatial Big Data pipelines, analysis techniques, and tools.
- AWS Cloud Experience:
- Familiarity with services like EC2, S3, Lambda, RDS, Glue, etc.
- Leadership & Collaboration:
- Promotes team engagement, psychological safety, and Agile practices such as paired programming, jam sessions, and knowledge sharing.
- Values innovation, experimentation, and rapid prototyping to generate insights.
- Encourages coding best practices, including CI/CD, source control, SDLC, and technical debt management.
- Partners with Product Owners to prioritize the backlog and provides rough estimates in ambiguous situations.
- Interpersonal Skills:
- Demonstrates strong communication, mentoring, problem-solving, and collaboration abilities.
- Education:
- Bachelor's or Master’s in geography, computer science, engineering, mathematics, geosciences, or a related field.
Preferred Qualifications:
- A proven track record of staying current with advancements in geospatial technologies.
- Experience with geospatial analysis and visualization tools and techniques.
- Knowledge of web mapping frameworks (e.g., Deck.gl, Leaflet, MapLibre).
- Familiarity with geospatial and other RESTful APIs.
- Experience with geospatial data processing frameworks like GeoTrellis or Rasterio.
- Awareness of machine learning or AI techniques for geospatial data analysis.
- Familiarity with serverless architectures or Kubernetes for geospatial processing.
