Senior Staff GIS Engineer

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 serve as a senior technical leader for the geospatial data and tooling capabilities that support a large-scale project. You will set technical direction for how geospatial data is sourced, evaluated, prepared, and delivered through AI/ML pipelines, while solving the organization’s most complex GIS engineering challenges.

You will work across imagery and other raster data, vector data, point clouds, and terrain and land-cover datasets. You will define scalable approaches for acquiring data from open, public-domain, and commercial sources, and you will help shape strategic partnerships with data providers. You will establish standards for coverage, freshness, quality, provenance, licensing, and cost so that geospatial datasets can be used reliably at scale.

You will architect and evolve automated systems that clean, validate, resize, reformat, align, and postprocess geospatial data for internal AI/ML and product teams. Using open-source technologies such as GDAL and PROJ, along with internally developed tools, you will guide the development of durable, observable, and reusable workflows rather than one-off processing solutions.

This is a highly cross-functional individual contributor role. You will partner with AI/ML, Pipeline, Product, and leadership teams to translate product vision into a long-term geospatial data strategy. You will also provide technical mentorship, raise engineering standards, lead design reviews, and influence decisions across teams without relying on direct authority.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical strategy and architecture for sourcing, preparing, validating geospatial datasets across target regions.
• Lead the resolution of ambiguous, high-impact GIS engineering problems that span multiple data modalities, systems, and teams.
• Define standards and measurable controls for data coverage, freshness, quality, provenance, licensing, reliability, and cost.
• Evaluate open, public-domain, and commercial sensor data sources, and provide technical leadership for provider selection and data partnerships.
• Architect scalable geospatial processing systems using open-source and internally developed tooling to align, crop, resample, transform, validate, and otherwise prepare data for use.
• Design and guide automated postprocessing workflows for the outputs of geospatial AI/ML pipelines, with attention to performance, repeatability, observability, and maintainability.
• Make meaningful hands-on contributions to internal software and tools used to source, process, catalog, and distribute geospatial datasets.
• Partner with AI/ML teams to anticipate model-development data needs and ensure access to diverse, representative, and fit-for-purpose datasets.
• Partner with Pipeline and Product teams to define data requirements, technical interfaces, quality thresholds, and launch-readiness criteria for new regions and capabilities.
• Lead technical design reviews and drive alignment on architecture, tradeoffs, sequencing, and risk across partner teams.
• Mentor engineers, share domain expertise, and establish engineering practices that improve the quality and velocity of the broader GIS function.
• Communicate complex technical decisions, dependencies, and risks clearly to engineering leaders, product partners, and other stakeholders.
• Partner closely with leadership to connect the long-term product vision to an actionable geospatial data and technology roadmap.

Qualifications

• Master's degree in GIS, Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of relevant industry experience, including substantial experience designing and delivering production geospatial data systems in a fast-paced technology environment.
• Demonstrated technical leadership across complex, cross-functional initiatives, including setting architecture, influencing technical direction, and driving work through ambiguity.
• Deep knowledge of geospatial modalities, formats, coordinate systems, and processing techniques, including experience with several of the following: raster data such as orthoimagery, landcover, DTM, DSM, and DEM data, stored as GeoTIFFs, JPEGs, or other formats; point clouds, including LiDAR-sourced point clouds stored  in LAS/LAZ and other formats; vector data of diverse types stored in formats such as Shapefile, GeoJSON, and OSM.
• Strong software engineering and system design experience, including architecture for scalable, maintainable, and automated data-processing systems.
• Advanced Python experience for production automation, data processing, tooling, testing, and integration with existing software systems.
• Experience assessing geospatial data quality, coverage, provenance, licensing constraints, and fitness for downstream technical use.
• Ability to communicate technical strategy and tradeoffs effectively with engineering, research, product, and senior leadership audiences.
• Experience applying a forward-looking but carefully considered integration of LLM-assisted development tools into a Geospatial Engineering workflow, where appropriate.

Desired Characteristics

• Deep experience with open-source geospatial libraries and tools, including GDAL and PROJ, for spatial data processing, transformation, and analysis.
• Comfort working outside an ArcGIS-centric workflow and selecting fit-for-purpose open-source technologies.
• Experience with Linux and shell environments such as bash.
• Experience building cloud-based or distributed data-processing workflows for large geospatial datasets.
• Familiarity with data catalogs, lineage, metadata, validation frameworks, monitoring, and operational support for production pipelines.
• Experience supporting geospatial data used in machine learning, computer vision, simulation, digital twins, or large-scale interactive applications.
• A collaborative, low-ego approach to technical leadership, with a demonstrated ability to mentor others and build alignment across disciplines.
• Passion and curiosity for GIS, software engineering, automation, and emerging GeoAI methods.

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: $175,000 - 210,000 (bonus eligible).

We are accepting applications for this position on an ongoing basis. 

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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 [email protected].

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.