Career Profile

I enjoy creating innovative IT solutions to provide the best earth observation data at scale, aiming to preserve biodiversity and restore the environment. As a product architect, I am responsible for developing machine learning (ML) workflows for land cover and biomass products at Space Intelligence. We expanded from five to over sixty highly educated people during my time at the company. I helped design and develop the technical architecture to scale our products throughout that growth. Previously, I was the technical lead for various satellite-data-driven projects at a Water and IT company.

Experiences

Product Architect

2021 - now
Space Intelligence, Edinburgh, UK

Developer on the Product Engineering Team, providing end-to-end ML environments for data scientists. I facilitate agile ceremonies, collaborate with the Data Platform Team to optimise pipelines and batch computing environments that provide high-quality map data, and work alongside the Solutions Team to generate valuable insights for clients.

Project Highlight: Developed land cover and biomass data for Apple’s Restore Fund. I visited Apple’s HQ in Cupertino, CA and presented our CarbonMapper biomass product at Apple’s ML conference in 2023.

Analyst

2020 - 2021
Space Intelligence, Edinburgh, UK

Delivered multiple land cover and biomass maps, primarily focused on tropical regions. Developed an app to interactively create opportunity maps for natural capital.

GIS Specialist

2016 - 2020
Nelen & Schuurmans, Utrecht, Netherlands

Technical lead in multiple international development projects establishing data integration flows for operational information services.

For example, I connected soil moisture data from VanDerSat - acquired by Planet in 2021 - into a mobile app for pepper farmers in SpiceUp Indonesia.

Led an internal group of developer-oriented consultants to gain foundational software and data engineering skills.

Open Source Contributions

SciPy 2024 Xarray tutorial - Co-organized 4-hour workshop during SciPy 2024, where I led the session on the Xarray ecosystem.
odc-geo - Added Azure extension to save Cloud-Optimized Geotiffs in a dask-optimized manner in the odc-geo Python library (2024).
pystac-client - FOSS4G sprint contribution enabling formatted search urls in python client to query STAC APIs (2022).
dask-geomodeling - On-the-fly operations on geographical maps (2020).

Skills & Proficiency

Data Engineering - Python

Machine Learning - LightGBM, scikit-learn, XGBoost

Infrastructure as code - Terraform

Cloud platforms - AWS, Azure, GCP

Map platforms & APIs

QGIS & ArcGIS