Senior Software Engineer — Spatial Analytics & Open Formats

Department: Engineering

Employment Type: Full Time

Location: Spain, Madrid, Remote - US or EU, Remote

The role

Where youd sit

What youll lead

• The Analytics Toolbox framework. Shape how spatial analytics is packaged, versioned, and pushed down into partner engines — and what it looks like when the consumer is an LLM agent, not a UI.
• Partner-engine SQL strategy. Every engine has its own dialect, optimizer, and idioms. Youll set the direction for how CARTO writes once and runs everywhere, without losing warehouse-native performance.
• The Iceberg / open-format play. CARTO organized the 2021 meeting with BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, and Oracle that catalyzed GeoParquet, and authored RaQuet for raster in Parquet. Iceberg is next. Youll define what spatial-first Iceberg looks like — for CARTO and for the ecosystem.
• Community and standards presence. This work happens in the open. OGC working groups, the Cloud Native Geospatial community, FOSS4G, conference talks, RFCs. Youll represent CARTO externally and help move the standards forward.
• AI as a native execution surface. Agentic GIS is where were going. The Toolbox isnt just a SQL library — its the substrate AI agents call into. Youll help define that interface.

Who you are

• Youve spent a serious chunk of your career in the cloud-native geospatial world. Youve built with — and ideally helped shape — some combination of DuckDB, GeoParquet, STAC, Arrow, Iceberg, point cloud formats, MobilityDB, or similar. You dont just use these tools; you have opinions about where theyre going.
• You know SQL at the engine level. You can read an execution plan across BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, and Databricks, and you have a clear view on what each one does well and badly for spatial workloads — partitioning, clustering, file pruning, pushdown, cost.
• You build with AI seriously. Youve shipped LLM-powered features in production, youve worked with agentic patterns, and you have a point of view on what this changes for analytics.
• Youre visible in the community — a FOSS4G or CNG talk, a maintained OSS project, a standards working group, a blog post people keep citing. Not vanity; this is how the role gets done.
• Youre a low-ego technical leader. You set direction by being right and being persuasive, not by being loud. You give direct feedback in PRs, ask good questions when you dont know something, and make the engineers around you better.
• Youre comfortable shipping production code — this isnt an architect-only role — in a cloud-native, serverless environment (GCP or AWS). TypeScript / Node.js experience is a plus since thats our backend, but it isnt the primary signal were hiring on.

We offer

• Compensation based on experience, discussed transparently during the process plus an annual bonus of up to 10% based on company objectives
• Contribute to a platform used by top companies around the world. Your work will have a direct impact on our users and clients
• Access to our Employee Stock Options Plan
• Private Medical Insurance
• Flexible compensation
• Education stipend
• Remote work stipend
• English classes