Geospatial Data Scientist
Develops geospatial and remote-sensing analytics in Python for Orcrist's Sentinel intelligence platform — change detection, object detection, segmentation and spatial/temporal analysis across optical, thermal and SAR satellite imagery — serving defense, law-enforcement and enterprise customers. Remote-first within Germany, with team sessions in Berlin, Frankfurt and Munich.
- Compensation
- Not disclosed
- Location
- Remote
- Work setup
- Remote
- Seniority
- Not specified
- Employment
- Not specified
- Experience
- Not specified
- Category
- Data science
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- Formal university training in geoinformatics, remote sensing, Earth observation, applied mathematics, computer science, or related discipline, with substantial hands-on geospatial or remote-sensing ex
- Strong Python and scientific computing skills (NumPy, pandas, SciPy, xarray, GeoPandas, Rasterio/GDAL)
- Practical machine-learning experience with scikit-learn and PyTorch or equivalent, plus TorchGeo or related geospatial deep-learning packages
- Solid understanding of remote-sensing fundamentals: spatial, spectral, radiometric, and temporal resolution; coordinate systems; image alignment; data-quality limitations
- Experience with satellite image analysis and at least one task such as change detection, segmentation, object detection, or land-cover classification
- Sound statistical judgment around sampling, spatial autocorrelation, data leakage, class imbalance, uncertainty, and generalization
- Engineering-minded research: versioned code and data, reproducible experiments, tests, clear explanations of method performance and failure modes
- Clear communication in English with technical colleagues and domain specialists
- Eligible to work in Germany
Nice to have
- Experience with thermal infrared imagery, SAR data processing, or multi-sensor data combination
- PhD in geoinformatics, remote sensing, Earth observation, or related field
- Experience with geospatial foundation models (e.g. Prithvi, TerraMind, AlphaEarth Foundations)
- Experience scaling geospatial analysis with Dask, Apache Spark/Sedona, or Zarr
- Experience deploying and optimising GPU inference (PyTorch/CUDA, ONNX Runtime with TensorRT, NVIDIA Triton Inference Server)
- Spatial SQL with DuckDB or PostGIS, STAC-based data discovery, QGIS or geemap, COG and GeoParquet outputs
- Experience with commercial imagery providers such as Airbus, Satellogic, SatVu, or ICEYE
- Experience working in defence and intelligence environments or on related projects
- Strong interest and practical ability in agentic software development with coding agents
Full description
Orcrist is building a next generation data intelligence platform using cutting-edge technologies. We're handling petabyte-scale data with sub-second queries. Our product is a Kubernetes‑based platform delivered as B2B SaaS or as a self‑hosted on‑prem solution, including air‑gapped deployments. We enable customers across defense, law enforcement, and enterprise to turn mission-critical data into actionable intelligence.
Role
Develop geospatial and remote-sensing methods that turn imagery and spatial data into reliable analytical products. You'll work in Python on change detection, object detection, segmentation, and spatial and temporal analysis. Your methods will span classical machine learning, statistical and image analysis, and deep learning architectures such as Vision Transformers (ViTs) and U-Nets, taking the approaches that prove useful from exploration through evaluation into repeatable platform capabilities.
The work includes open satellite time series and commercial optical, thermal, and SAR imagery. You'll help choose appropriate data and methods, establish what the results can support, and work with engineers to make them available to analysts inside Sentinel.
What you'll do
- Develop change-detection workflows, including Sentinel-2 time series, and distinguish meaningful change from seasonality, cloud and shadow effects, acquisition differences, and registration errors.
- Build and evaluate object-detection, segmentation, and classification methods for satellite imagery, using statistical techniques, classical image processing, and machine learning where appropriate. Evaluate state-of-the-art deep learning approaches pragmatically against simpler baselines, weighing accuracy, label requirements, generalization, inference cost, and real production viability.
- Assess the suitability of different sensors, resolutions, acquisition conditions, and processing levels for each use case. Extend methods across optical, multispectral, thermal, and SAR data as requirements develop.
- Design preprocessing and feature extraction with data engineers: quality masking, compositing, co-registration, normalization, spectral indices, and sensor-specific corrections.
- Combine raster outputs with vector and temporal data for spatial statistics, zonal analysis, anomaly detection, and comparison across areas and observation periods.
- Build or source reference datasets and evaluation protocols. Use spatially and temporally separated validation, measure false positives and missed detections, and examine performance across regions and sensors.
- Deliver traceable results with source references, timestamps, confidence or uncertainty measures, and documented limitations. Help analysts understand when a result needs closer review.