Staff GIS Developer

Company Description

NBCUniversal is one of the world's leading media and entertainment companies. We create world-class content, which we distribute across our portfolio of film, television, and streaming, and bring to life through our global theme park destinations, consumer products, and experiences. We own and operate leading entertainment and news brands, including NBC, NBC News, NBC Sports, Telemundo, NBC Local Stations, Bravo, and Peacock, our premium ad-supported streaming service. We produce and distribute premier filmed entertainment and programming through our powerhouse film and television studios, including Universal Pictures, DreamWorks Animation, and Focus Features, and the four global television studios under the Universal Studio Group banner, and operate industry-leading theme parks and experiences around the world through Universal Destinations & Experiences, including Universal Orlando Resort, home to Universal Epic Universe, and Universal Studios Hollywood. NBCUniversal is a subsidiary of Comcast Corporation. Visit www.nbcuniversal.com for more information.

Our impact is rooted in improving the communities where our employees, customers, and audiences live and work. We have a rich tradition of giving back and ensuring our employees have the opportunity to serve their communities. We champion an inclusive culture and strive to attract and develop a talented workforce to create and deliver a wide range of content reflecting our world.

Job Description

In this role, you will drive geospatial data and tooling needs for a large-scale project. You will be part of a team of GIS engineers responsible for sourcing geospatial data in many modalities, and for building geospatial data automation and tooling in an AI/ML pipeline for new applications. 

In this role, you’ll research and gather data for specific regions from different sources, including imagery and other raster data, vector data, and point clouds. You will find and acquire data from free/public domain sources, as well as form and drive partnerships with commercial data providers. You will be responsible for managing the coverage, freshness, quality, and cost of the sourced data. The most successful team members will have a working knowledge of disparate effective sources of data, and a curiosity for finding new ones. 

To prepare this data for AI/ML use, you’ll build and use automated tools (e.g., incorporating open source libraries like GDAL and in-house tools) to clean, resize, reformat, and align it so it’s ready for internal customers to use. You will also be responsible for tooling to automatically postprocess the output of a geospatial AI/ML pipeline for use by other teams. 

This role involves working closely with different teams in our organization. You’ll partner with the AI/ML teams to supply diverse data they need for building new machine learning models, and with the Pipeline and Product teams to ensure they have the necessary data required.  

Responsibilities include, but not limited to:  

• Aggregate data for target regions and ensure that a complete collection of data is available.  
• Research open, public domain, and commercial sensor data sources to determine the areas, quality, and freshness of available data.  
• Utilize open source (e.g. GDAL) and internally developed software tools to preprocess, align, crop, resample, and otherwise prepare data for use. We prefer open source tools over proprietary software, but understand that some software has no great open source equivalent. 
• Contribute to our internal tools that process and source geospatial datasets.  
• Partner with groups across the organization to understand needs for GIS data for AI/ML research. Coordinate with AI/ML team to provide diverse data for developing new machine learning algorithms, and the Pipeline and Product teams to provide data to roll out new regions.  
• Partner closely with leadership to understand the high-level product vision. 

Qualifications

• Masters degree in GIS, Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field  
• 4+ years of relevant industry experience in a fast paced, high growth tech environment.  
• Experience with GIS modalities and formats, including at least some of orthoimagery (e.g. GeoTIFF), point clouds such as LiDAR (e.g. LAS/LAZ), vector data (e.g. ESRI Shapefiles, GeoJSON, OSM), raster data storing elevation and terrain information such as DTM, DSM, and DEMs, and raster data storing landcover information. 
• Software engineering experience, including designing and architecting software. Experience in Python for automation of common tasks and/or contributing to our existing tool palette is required. 

Desired Characteristics:  

• Team-oriented and collaborative approach with a demonstrated aptitude, enthusiasm and willingness to learn new methods, tools, practices and skills.  
• Passion and curiosity for GIS and software engineering. 
• Experience working with open-source GIS libraries and tools, including PROJ and GDAL, for spatial data processing, transformation, and analysis. Comfort with working outside of an ArcGIS-centric workflow. 
• Experience with some flavor of Linux. Comfort with some flavor of a *nix shell environment (e.g. bash) is strongly preferred.  
• Enthusiasm for automated development processes and systems.  

This position is eligible for company sponsored benefits, including medical, dental and vision insurance, 401(k), paid leave, tuition reimbursement, and a variety of other discounts and perks. Learn more about the benefits offered by NBCUniversal by visiting the Benefits page of the Careers website. Salary range: $125,000 - $160,000 (bonus eligibility). 

Additional Information

As part of our selection process, external candidates may be required to attend an in-person interview with an NBCUniversal employee at one of our locations prior to a hiring decision. NBCUniversal's policy is to provide equal employment opportunities to all applicants and employees without regard to race, color, religion, creed, gender, gender identity or expression, age, national origin or ancestry, citizenship, disability, sexual orientation, marital status, pregnancy, veteran status, membership in the uniformed services, genetic information, or any other basis protected by applicable law. 

If you are a qualified individual with a disability or a disabled veteran, you have the right to request a reasonable accommodation if you are unable or limited in your ability to use or access nbcunicareers.com as a result of your disability. You can request reasonable accommodations by emailing AccessibilitySupport@nbcuni.com.

For LA County and City Residents Only:  NBCUniversal will consider for employment  qualified applicants with criminal histories, or arrest or conviction records, in a manner  consistent with relevant legal requirements, including the City of Los Angeles' Fair Chance Initiative For Hiring Ordinance, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for Employers, and the California Fair Chance Act, where applicable.