Software Engineer (Geospatial Data Engineer)

Company: Vibrant Planet Contact: Michael Callahan — michael.callahan@vibrantplanet.net Location: Remote (US Pacific/Mountain Time preferred)

About Vibrant Planet

Vibrant Planet is a team of leaders in science, forestry, policy, and technology building a cloud-based, data-driven platform to increase the pace and scale of forest restoration. Our work reduces catastrophic wildfire, tree mortality, forest degradation, and deforestation.

Our platform modernizes land management planning and monitoring with:

• AI-driven data development
• User-friendly scenario building and decision support
• Forest resilience trends and treatment outcome detection

We quantify treatment benefits to support markets for ecosystem services (carbon, water, biodiversity, sustainable forest products).

Founded in 2021, Vibrant Planet initially focused on fire-adapted landscapes in California and the Western US, with a global mission and roadmap. We are backed by Grantham Foundation, Earthshot, Elemental Excelerator, Ecosystem Integrity Fund, Chris Cox (CPO at Facebook), Neil Hunt (former CPO of Netflix), Cisco, Valia Ventures, and Halogen Ventures.

About Pyrologix

Pyrologix (a Vibrant Planet subsidiary) is a small team of analysts, scientists, and engineers studying spatial and temporal wildfire hazard and risk. Learn more at pyrologix.com.

Commitment to Equity

Vibrant Planet is an equal opportunity employer committed to diversity, inclusion, and cultivating a community that thrives on differences. We encourage applicants from all backgrounds to apply — even if you don’t meet every listed qualification.

More info: vibrantplanet.net

About the Role

We are seeking a versatile, experienced Software Engineer (Geospatial Data Engineer) to scale and build our geospatial pipelines and tooling.

You will:

• Support Vibrant Planet’s wildfire risk products
• Own critical systems transforming raw inputs (fuel, weather, topography) into decision-ready data
• Collaborate across engineering, science, and analytics teams
• Contribute to engineering culture in a dynamic startup environment

This is a remote role. Comfort and effectiveness in distributed teams is essential.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and scale geospatial data systems, infrastructure, and web applications
• Build and maintain pipelines for large-scale geospatial data (wildfire and fuel modeling)
• Manage cloud infrastructure hosting orchestration and compute environments
• Develop web-based dashboards and interactive maps
• Implement data quality checks to ensure accuracy and completeness
• Collaborate with cross-disciplinary teams to share knowledge and expertise
• Lead design, coding, testing, and production release cycles
• Mentor and review code of other engineers

Technical Qualifications

• 5+ years software engineering experience
• 2+ years geospatial data engineering experience (Raster/Vector processing, GeoPandas, Rasterio, GDAL, Postgres/PostGIS, Shapely, Xarray, Zarr)
• Strong proficiency in Python (clean, high-quality, tested code)
• Experience with cloud providers (AWS, GCP, etc.)
• Experience with orchestration/distributed frameworks (Airflow, Prefect, Hadoop, Spark, Ray)

Bonus (Not Required)

• Docker, Kubernetes
• Modern JavaScript frameworks (React, Svelte, Next.js)
• Elixir/Phoenix
• Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)
• Interactive web mapping (OpenLayers, Mapbox GL JS, MapLibre, Leaflet)
• QGIS
• Knowledge of wildfire, forest management, or natural resource fields

Other Expectations

• Strong communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences
• Collaborative team mindset with eagerness to learn and share knowledge
• Proactive problem-solver with empathy and creativity
• Commitment to writing maintainable, testable code

Location

• Remote-first company
• Majority of team in Pacific and Mountain time zones
• Offices in Missoula, MT and Truckee, CA
• No H1B sponsorship available

Benefits

• Salary: $100,000 – $200,000 / year
• Health Insurance
• Unlimited PTO
• Equity options
• One-time home office setup allowance

How to Apply

Submit:

• Resume (max 2 pages)
• Cover letter (max 2 pages)
• Responses to Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities questions

via Google Form (link provided in posting). All applicants will be contacted after each round.