Remote Sensing Data Engineer – Satellite Methane Platform

About the role

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) is seeking a Remote Sensing Data Engineer consultant to enhance the International Methane Emissions Observatory (IMEO) data platform. The role focuses on integrating new satellite sources, maintaining ingestion pipelines, and delivering reliable methane emission products.

Key responsibilities

• Integrate new satellite data sources into the Methane Alert and Response System (MARS), including high‑temporal‑frequency geostationary sensors.
• Maintain and monitor the Azure‑based data ingestion pipeline, triage issues in Jira and extend data quality checks for new sources.
• Own and improve the source persistency pipeline that estimates source persistency and annual methane emissions for point sources.
• Automate public data products such as plume exports, the top‑50 emitters list, and detection/non‑detection time‑series datasets.

Required profile

• Bachelor’s degree in Remote Sensing, Computer Science, Data Science, Physics or a related field.
• Strong interest in environmental and climate challenges, demonstrated through academic projects or open‑source contributions.

Required skills

• Proficiency in Python and its scientific/geospatial libraries for satellite data processing.
• Experience with PostgreSQL and Azure cloud services, including Azure ML Studio.
• Software‑engineering best practices: Git version control, Docker containerisation, CI/CD pipelines (e.g., Jenkins).
• Familiarity with issue‑tracking tools such as Jira.