Backend Software Engineer

A backend software engineer working in the Bushfire / GIS Space with 10+ years experience

About Me

I’m a Software Engineer based in South Brisbane, Australia. I graduated from Griffith University with a Bachelor of Software Engineering (Honours) in 2015. I’ve been working professionally as a software engineer since then. I’m seeking challenges in the GIS / Bushfire space and am currently working on a fuel modelling pipeline with AEM.

Roles

I’m currently developing software for aem.eco, an American environmental monitoring organisation with an interest in bushfire (or wildfire, as they call it) services. My role is focused on building a Python/Dask/Xarray/GDAL pipeline that consumes a variety of data sources (Sentinel-2, BOM forecasts, and a huge variety of published datasets) and constructs weekly fuel maps indicating fuel types, canopy height and density and drought conditions. These fuel maps are used in a bushfire simulator to understand fire spread behaviour.

I previously worked for FireSight, a small company providing geospatial bushfire advice to local councils. My role developed Python tools and QGIS plugins to provide utility to FireSight, allowing the analysis and extraction of historical weather, simulation output and satellite imagery, to create in-depth understanding of fire risk.

Further back, I’d been leading the development and architecture of the RedEye Bushfire Platform Convexion, a SaaS platform, which analysed landscape scale risk of bushfire and integrated Phoenix RapidFire, a fire simulation tool, into a web interface hosted in the cloud. This was created with Java, Spring Boot, Python and PostgreSQL.

This was a technically challenging project, which involved large raster datasets including layers from tens to hundreds of billions of pixels. Cloud optimised GeoTiffs, Mapbox vector tiles, Postgis, Leaflet, NetCDF, Python and GDAL are a handful of the technologies we leveraged to provide a responsive browser experience to the user. This project leaned heavily on researching and investigating suitable approaches to large data problems.

I’ve spent the majority of my career developing cloud based multi-tenant Spring Boot Web APIs in Java for the RedEye platform, spanning across three discrete product offerings - Convexion, RedEyeWFM, RedEyeDMS.