Cloud Engineer

We are seeking a Cloud Engineer to develop tools for managing massive earth data on the cloud. As a Cloud Engineer at Development Seed, you will create software enabling our partners, such as NASA and ESA, to manage cloud-based data effectively.

NASA and other earth observation organizations are collecting vast amounts of geospatial data. With your expertise, we can unlock the rich information stored in these archives. You will build systems to support the delivery of this data to the cloud and translation to formats, cataloging, and services, making the discovery of the information frictionless. You will create new patterns to manage, process, and distribute earthdata. You will enable earth scientists to work smarter and faster, giving us all better insight into our changing planet.

Your primary contribution will be readable, maintainable code focusing on cloud infrastructure, data pipelines, and developer operations (DevOps). You should be comfortable communicating ideas about Infrastructure as Code (IaC), Continuous Integration and Deployment (CI/CD), serverless, distributed systems, networking, and maybe even cloud-native geospatial. You will help us continue to be our best by making architectural recommendations, creating scalable and reusable cloud systems, and contributing to open-source libraries that improve the state of the art for creating a positive impact.

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 a growth mindset. 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.

As a Cloud Engineer, you will:

• Build and deploy reliable and scalable services optimized to deliver petabytes of satellite imagery data to millions of simultaneous users
• Use cloud services to process imagery in near real-time
• Use the best earth science and cloud technology and practices available
• 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 with stakeholders to understand the needs of end-users
• Solve real problems for organizations addressing global challenges
• Learn and grow with a team that is committed to your success
• 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, repeatable data processing and manipulation tools for cloud technologies. Most of your time will be spent writing software and building infrastructure enabling access to earthdata. An ideal candidate has experience with Amazon Web Services and CDK, Docker and Kubernetes, GitHub Actions, and geospatial data and is excited to learn new tools, services, and approaches.

About you

Requirements:

• Minimum of 3 years professional experience related to software development
• Minimum of 2 years of cloud platform experience, e.g. Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), or Microsoft Azure
• Experience with infrastructure as code, e.g. AWS CDK, GitHub Actions, and other DevOps tools for deployment and observability
• Experience using containerization and orchestration to create scalable deployments, e.g. Docker and Kubernetes
• Proficiency in Python 
• Experience with Git, GitHub, and project management tools
• Ability to learn quickly and adapt to solve new challenges
• Strong communication skills in a remote setting
• Experience taking initiative and working autonomously
• Work schedule in North American or European time zones

Nice to have:

• Experience with earth observation data
• Familiarity with cloud-optimized formats, including Xarray, Zarr, COG, GeoParquet, and n-dimensional data handling in the cloud
• Willingness to communicate with stakeholders
• Experience with pair programming in a remote environment

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. Application. The deadline for submitting your application is Friday March 29
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.