Wietze Suijker

EO Data Engineer

Connecting satellite data to environmental impact. Open-source contributor to GDAL, Xarray, and the FOSS4G ecosystem.

Career Profile

Ten years connecting Earth observation data to environmental impact - from a carbon sequestration thesis to production ML pipelines to climate AI. Active open-source contributor to GDAL’s Zarr v3 driver. Previously built GeoZarr pipelines for ESA’s Earth Observation Processing Framework at DevelopmentSeed, and spent five years as Product Architect at Space Intelligence, where I co-designed the technical architecture that scaled from a five-person startup to a sixty-person company shipping global land cover and biomass products.

Experiences

Data Engineer / Senior Research Advisor

2026
IVADO, Montréal, Canada

Drive data engineering in AI applications related to climate change, sustainability and biodiversity.

EO Data Engineer

Autumn 2025
DevelopmentSeed, Contractor, Remote

Open-source contributions to GeoZarr data pipelines and data models for the ESA Copernicus Earth Observation Processing Framework (EOPF). Also contributed to the platform’s Kubernetes/FluxCD deployment infrastructure.

Product Architect

2020 - 2025
Space Intelligence, Edinburgh, UK

Co-authored the standardized project template and Python library powering all land cover and biomass map products. Designed ML pipelines (Random Forest, LightGBM) on Dask/Zarr/COG with Azure and AWS infrastructure (Terraform). Scaled the technical architecture as the team grew from five to over sixty.

Project Highlight: Developed land cover and biomass data for Apple’s Restore Fund. Presented our CarbonMapper biomass product at Apple’s ML conference in Cupertino, CA (2023).

GIS Specialist

2016 - 2020
Nelen & Schuurmans, Utrecht, Netherlands

Technical lead on international development projects building data integration flows - e.g. connecting VanDerSat (now Planet) soil moisture data into a mobile app for pepper farmers in Indonesia.

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

Open Source Contributions

GDAL - Contributions to the Zarr v3 driver: parallel shard I/O, string data types, coordinate caching, and CI improvements (2026).
EOPF Explorer - GeoZarr data pipelines and data model for ESA's Copernicus Earth Observation Processing Framework. Contributions to data-pipeline and data-model (2025).
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

Geospatial Python

Xarray Rasterio GeoPandas STAC

Data Engineering

Pandas NumPy Dask PostgreSQL/PostGIS

Machine Learning

LightGBM scikit-learn XGBoost

Cloud & Infra

AWS Azure GCP Terraform Docker

Desktop GIS

QGIS ArcGIS

AI-assisted development

Claude GitHub Copilot