GIS Engineer - Contractor

Overstory; United States; Remote; USD 60,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job summary

Join a mission-driven team tackling the climate crisis through innovative technology. As a GIS contractor, you'll leverage your Python skills to process geospatial data and enhance the resilience of electrical grids. This role offers the chance to work on meaningful projects that reduce wildfire risks and protect natural resources. With a fully remote working environment, you'll collaborate with a diverse team dedicated to openness and respect. If you're passionate about making a difference and thrive in a flexible, supportive setting, this opportunity is for you.

Benefits

Flexible remote working environment

Autonomy in work schedule

Supportive team culture

Annual team gathering event

Qualifications

• At least 2 years of relevant experience in GIS and spatial data management.
• Strong communication skills and ability to work under pressure.

Responsibilities

• Process large amounts of geospatial vector data, specifically power lines data.
• Use Python to clean, remove, and augment data for analysis.

Skills

Python

Geospatial vector data

Jupyter notebooks

Geopandas

Shapely

GitHub

Slack

Notion

Google Suite

English communication

Education

Relevant experience in GIS

Tools

GitHub

Jupyter notebooks

Job description

The climate crisis is the defining challenge of our time—but it’s also the greatest opportunity for innovation, and a challenge we’re proud to take on. At Overstory, we’re harnessing cutting-edge technology to enable a resilient electrical grid that keeps communities thriving as our world changes.

The grid is the backbone of life as we know it. It powers hospitals, keeps food fresh, and ensures communities stay connected. But extreme weather, aging infrastructure, and growing wildfire risks are putting this critical system under pressure. All of this combined makes the electric utility industry the greatest opportunity for tackling climate change.

One of the leading causes of catastrophic wildfires and power outages? Trees and brush coming into contact with power lines.

That’s where we help. At Overstory, we use AI and advanced satellite imagery to pinpoint and prioritize vegetation risks before they materialize. By giving utilities critical analysis on those risks, we’re helping prevent outages, reduce wildfire risks, and accelerate the transition to a safer, more resilient grid.

As a GIS contractor at Overstory, you will be responsible for processing large amounts of geospatial vector data, specifically power lines data. You will use and build tools to achieve high efficiency, balancing speed with quality.

The role in detail

You’ll spend most of your time using Python (writing reusable Python modules for our internal tools and working in ipython notebooks) to get vector data in the right format by cleaning, removing, and augmenting the data. You’ll need to map attribute names in the data to attributes that are required downstream, while also solving GIS problems that naturally come with the variety of data we process. It will be necessary to work on multiple datasets in parallel, switching between them as you get blocked. You’ll be working as part of the Data Ingestion team and will attend daily standup meetings.

Skills

• You are comfortable working with Python code and Jupyter notebooks to solve geospatial problems.
• You have experience working with geospatial vector data using libraries such as Geopandas and Shapely.
• You are familiar with GitHub, and tools such as Slack, Notion, Google Suite.
• Your written and verbal English communication skills are excellent, and you have empathy and understanding of different roles in the company.
• You manage your own time effectively, across multiple projects and occasionally under pressure, able to prioritize short and long-term activities with a strategic approach.
• You have strong attention to detail and you are well-organized, keeping many files in the right places and clear documentation up-to-date.
• You are flexible, ready and able to learn new things, and able to quickly adapt to new working practices and technologies.

Experience

• You have experience working efficiently, managing your time to meet deadlines and deliver high-quality results.
• Your experiences have given you a strong capacity to work through trade-offs, to make decisions, to prioritize, and to choose and implement practical solutions.
• You will face challenges with pragmatism, finding creative ways forward, and putting them into practice.

About you

• You are fluent in English.
• You have at least 2 years of relevant experience.
• You are comfortable with Python for spatial data management.
• You are creative and curious.
• You are pragmatic, knowing when a simple solution is sufficient or when new development is required.
• You are a strong communicator, able to express your ideas succinctly and make complex ideas accessible to others.
• You can talk to software engineers and data engineers. You have an eye for quality; your work is thorough, and you pay attention to both the small details and the larger picture.
• Teamwork is at your core, and you like to help others grow and succeed.
• Ideally, you’re in a time zone +/- 1 hour from CET.

Nice-to-haves

• Experience working with GIS data in public or private utility.
• Knowledge about electric utilities.
• Experience in a remote team.

What you get

• To be part of truly mission-driven work that reduces wildfires, protects earth’s natural resources, and helps solve our climate crisis.
• Flexible fully remote working environment with a lot of autonomy. We build our workdays around our lives, not the other way around.
• To be surrounded by an excellent, vibrant, smart team who have each other's back and believe in a culture of openness, tolerance, and respect.

Contract

• 40 hours per week - full time.
• For a period of 12 weeks to start with.

About our team

We are a group of 64 people from all over the world. Fifteen nationalities are represented in our team. We work remotely from nine different countries and we are looking for candidates that are also living and working in one of these countries: United States, the Netherlands, United Kingdom, Ireland, Estonia, Portugal, France, Sweden, Denmark, and Canada. We meet up once a year in-person for our unforgettable team gathering event. We also offer the option to occasionally meet up for in-person collaboration.

Diversity & Inclusion

We place enormous value on diversity and inclusion and strive to continually bring in people of all genders, races, creeds, ethnicities, abilities, and backgrounds. We believe that the best ideas emerge when people with different perspectives and approaches work together on a problem.

Our values

Tackling the climate crisis is our greatest mission.

We act with urgency.

Our curiosity fuels our growth.

We recognize that change is constant, and we find joy and power in exploration.

We’re rooted in diversity.

Just as ecosystems need biodiversity to thrive, our resiliency comes from our differences.

We care for each other.

We love the power of machines but we nurture each other as humans.

Trust is fundamental.

We assume the best in everyone, and we share ideas openly so that we have a positive impact.

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