GIS Data Engineer
Black Canyon Consulting · Bethesda
Overview
We are seeking a GIS Data Engineer to develop and automate the geospatial data foundation for a federal permitting modernization initiative.
The GIS Data Engineer will integrate authoritative geospatial reference data with permitting information and develop reusable pipelines for converting spatial information from maps, plats, survey drawings, and legal descriptions into validated geospatial datasets. The role will work with cloud-native geospatial formats such as GeoParquet and spatial databases including PostGIS.
This position is remote.
Duties & Responsibilities
- Design and implement reusable pipelines for ingesting, standardizing, validating, and publishing geospatial datasets.
- Build and maintain authoritative reference layers including PLSS/CadNSDI, land status, Surface Management Agency information, split estate, corridors, critical habitat, and other relevant spatial datasets.
- Transform and publish geospatial datasets using GeoParquet and maintain PostGIS serving layers for application and spatial-query workloads.
- Develop automated workflows for georeferencing scanned maps, plats, location maps, and survey drawings.
- Convert information extracted from maps and documents into validated vector geometry.
- Work with Content Pipeline Engineers to combine OCR and document extraction results with geospatial processing.
- Interpret and transform legal descriptions, bearings, distances, coordinates, parcel information, and survey data into geospatial features.
- Develop reusable processing patterns for well, lease, unit, communitization agreement, right-of-way, project-area, and other permitting-related geometries.
- Implement spatial joins, intersections, overlays, proximity calculations, and other spatial transformations.
- Manage coordinate reference systems, transformations, spatial precision, and indexing.
- Implement automated geometry validation, topology checks, and reconciliation processes.
- Preserve provenance between generated geometries, source documents, and originating systems.
- Optimize geospatial datasets and spatial queries for application and analytical performance.
- Establish reusable GIS engineering standards and document processing workflows.
Educational Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Geographic Information Systems, Geography, Geomatics, Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
Requirements
- 5+ years of GIS engineering, geospatial data engineering, software engineering, or related experience.
- Strong Python and SQL skills with experience building automated geospatial data pipelines.
- Hands-on experience with GeoParquet and PostGIS.
- Strong experience working with vector and raster geospatial data.
- Experience with geospatial libraries and tools such as GDAL, GeoPandas, Shapely, PROJ, Rasterio, or comparable technologies.
- Strong understanding of coordinate reference systems, spatial transformations, spatial indexing, and geometry validation.
- Experience with spatial joins, overlays, topology validation, geometry repair, and other spatial-processing operations.
- Experience georeferencing raster maps, scanned maps, or similar source material.
- Experience with AWS S3 or comparable cloud object storage and cloud-native geospatial processing patterns.
- Ability to design repeatable and automated geospatial pipelines rather than relying primarily on manual desktop GIS workflows.
Bonus Skills
- Experience with PLSS/CadNSDI or other federal land and geospatial datasets.
- Experience with ArcGIS Pro, QGIS, or comparable GIS platforms.
- Experience working with plats, survey drawings, legal land descriptions, bearings, and distances.
- Experience applying OCR, computer vision, multimodal AI, or document-extraction technologies to maps and geospatial source material.
- Experience with agentic or AI-enabled geospatial workflows, including frameworks such as LangChain, LangGraph, or similar technologies.
- Experience working in the U.S. Federal Government space.
Experience with natural-resource, environmental, land-management, oil and gas, right-of-way, or permitting datasets.
Benefits and Salary
We attract the best people in the business with our competitive benefits package that includes medical, dental and vision coverage, 401k plan with employer contribution, paid holidays, vacation, and tuition reimbursement.
If you enjoy being a part of a high performing, professional service and technology focused organization, please apply today!
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