Senior Data Engineer, Geospatial

Role highlights:

• Senior Data Engineer, Geospatial
• Location: Espoo, Finland
• Department: Solutions
• Reports to: Director of Product Engineering
• Employment type: Permanent
• Workplace model: Hybrid
• Employment is subject to applicable security screening (incl. SUPO, where required)
  

Why this role matters:

Our ICEYE Solutions analytical products are powered by a geospatial data platform that joins satellite-derived observations with terrain, weather, and other third-party datasets. We are scaling this platform significantly in geographic coverage, breadth of data sources, and the demands placed on it by our data science teams.

Who We Are

ICEYE delivers space-based intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) capabilities to governments and allied nations. This includes sovereign and turnkey ISR missions leveraging ICEYE’s world-leading synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite technology, as well as access to data from the world’s largest SAR satellite constellation. These capabilities enable partners to detect and respond to critical changes anywhere on Earth with unprecedented speed and accuracy – day or night and in any weather, supported by ultra high-resolution imagery and high-frequency revisits.

As a trusted partner for defense, intelligence, security, and maritime domain awareness, ICEYE’s near real-time data creates a tactical advantage for mission-critical operations. Designed for dual use, the platform also serves civil protection and commercial users for natural-catastrophe intelligence, insurance, maritime monitoring (including oil-spill detection), and finance, contributing to global security and community resilience.

ICEYE is headquartered in Finland and operates globally across Europe, North America, the Middle East, and Asia-Pacific. We have more than 900 employees, united by a shared vision: improving life on Earth by becoming the global source of truth in Earth Observation.

Your day-to day responsibilities

• Pipeline Scaling: Extend the existing geospatial data pipeline to cover millions of US properties across several states, using established ingest patterns and adding new data sources
• Data Integration: Integrate terrain, hydrographic, land cover, weather, and third-party risk datasets; build and maintain spatial joins at the property scale with quality and lineage tracking
• Performance Tuning: Configure and tune databases for large-scale spatial workloads, indexes, parallelism, memory, and connection management
• Frictionless Data Delivery: Automate versioned, analysis-ready data flows that allow data scientists to move from experimental hypothesis to production with zero friction
• Data Quality: Maintain coverage monitoring and consistency checks across geographies and data sources
• Workflow Reliability: Improve the scheduling, orchestration, and observability of ingest and export pipelines to support repeatable production operations across geographies and data sources

Requirements

What we’re looking for

Must haves:

• Analytical Architecture & Dataset Design: Proven experience designing and building analysis-ready data structures. You know how to transform raw, noisy geospatial sources into clean, versioned, and performant datasets (e.g., Star Schemas, Feature Tables, or Partitioned Parquet) that allow researchers to iterate without friction
• Geospatial & Performance Engineering: 5+ years of professional experience with PostgreSQL / PostGIS in production. You possess deep knowledge of spatial indexing, complex joins, and the performance trade-offs between database-centric and distributed execution patterns for large-scale raster and vector processing
• Software Craftsmanship & Code Ownership: Confidence in reading and extending complex Python codebases. You value incremental delivery and have the engineering discipline to ship production-grade code that is testable and maintainable from day one
• Data Modeling & Integrity Mastery: Hands-on expertise with common geospatial models and cloud-native formats (Cloud Optimized GeoTIFFs, Geoparquet, STAC). You understand the "physicality" of the data reprojections, tiling, and transformations and how to structure it to ensure long-term data integrity and lineage
• Modern Tooling & Velocity: A pragmatic and expert-level approach to using AI-assisted tools (e.g., Cursor, Claude, Copilot). You use these to accelerate routine engineering (boilerplate, unit tests, refactoring), allowing you to focus on high-level architectural decisions
• Infrastructure & AWS: Proficiency with AWS (S3, RDS/Aurora, EC2) and scaling database workloads. You have experience managing high-volume data flows where operational stability is as important as the speed of the initial delivery.
• Education: Master’s degree in Computer Science, Geoinformatics, or a related quantitative field or equivalent depth earned through building real-world systems at scale
  

Nice to haves:

• Experience with flood, climate, or natural hazard data (FEMA, NOAA, USGS)
• Deep familiarity with classic and modern geospatial stack - from GDAL/OGR to rioxarray
• Experience with distributed data platforms such as Databricks, Delta Lake, PySpark, or Unity Catalog
• Parquet / Arrow for analytical data export
• Docker and Makefile-based development workflows
• Tech stack: PostgreSQL / PostGIS, Python, rasterio / GDAL, AWS, Docker

Application Process

• Recruiter screening
• Hiring manager interview
• Technical task
• Technical panel interview
• Final interview

Working at ICEYE

At ICEYE, you’ll join a diverse and highly engaged team united by the ambition to make the impossible possible. As a global scale-up, we combine speed and ambition with the opportunity to take real ownership from day one. Your growth, wellbeing, and success are a priority, with continuous professional development, training opportunities, and a culture where collaboration is how we win.

How We Work (Our Values)

Make the impossible possible: We set ambitious goals and stay calm under pressure. We bring grit, optimism, and ownership when things get hard, and we keep moving until we find a way.

• Be curious: Go deep, ask questions, listen carefully, and think critically. Understand the “why” behind decisions.
• See the big picture: Stay close to what’s happening across the company so you can make better decisions. Consider how your work affects others.
• Drive effective teamwork: Create psychological safety, invite different perspectives, and build inclusive teams. There are no bad questions.
• Act as one team: We win together. We match tasks to the right owner and stay agile as priorities shift.
• Have fun: What we do matters—and it should be enjoyable. Celebrate progress, take pride in results, and share the wins.
  

Benefits

Our benefits are designed to support your health and wellbeing, at work and beyond. We keep improving them based on employee feedback, and offerings vary by location. Talent Acquisition will confirm what applies for this role and location during the process.

Our Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

We want ICEYE to be a place where people can be themselves and do great work. Different backgrounds and perspectives make us stronger, which is why we work to create an environment where people feel included, respected, and able to speak up. Whatever your background, we want you to bring your authentic self to the table.

We’re committed to fair, inclusive hiring and equal opportunity. Everyone is welcome to apply. If you need any adjustments or support during the recruitment process, tell us—we’ll do our best to help.

Apply now to start your ICEYE journey, and help us continue to make the impossible possible together. Read more about ICEYE and working with us at iceye.com.