Lead GIS Engineer

Cedar•San Diego, CA

7h•$130,000 - $155,000•Onsite

About The Position

Help reinvent how housing gets designed, permitted, and built in America. Cedar is building the operating system for urban housing delivery. We combine architectural expertise with software, automation, and data systems to dramatically accelerate how projects move from land acquisition to approved designs and construction. The result: faster timelines, higher quality, lower risk, and more housing in the cities that need it most. Our team blends architects, engineers, and product builders. We design real buildings—and we build the software systems that make great architecture scalable. As Lead GIS Engineer, you'll own Cedar's geospatial data infrastructure end-to-end: sourcing regulatory and land use data from hundreds of municipal systems, processing it into consistent formats, and delivering it across our products. You'll take over an existing Python-based pipeline and extend it to new jurisdictions, improve its reliability, and build out adjacent workflows for parcel data, zoning information, and other regulatory datasets. This is a high-autonomy role. You'll work closely with product and engineering teams to understand what data is needed, then figure out how to source, process, and deliver it. We strongly prefer candidates who can share recent solo-developed projects or meaningful open source contributions. It gives us a clear signal of how you think and build, and lets us skip the usual technical interview gauntlet.

Requirements

Deep experience working with municipal and county GIS data from authoritative sources
Comfortable navigating government data portals, ESRI REST APIs, and the inconsistencies that come with public-sector data
Strong Python skills with hands-on experience in geospatial libraries (GeoPandas, Shapely, Fiona, or equivalents)
Familiar with vector tile workflows and web map delivery
Self-directed: you can take "we need flood zone data for Phoenix" and figure out the rest
High bar for data quality and consistency across jurisdictions
Pragmatic about tradeoffs between coverage, accuracy, and speed
5+ years working with GIS data in a professional context
Production experience with Python geospatial tools
Familiarity with ESRI data services and common government GIS formats
Experience with vector tile generation and web map delivery
Understanding of coordinate reference systems, geometry operations, and spatial data quality issues
Comfortable with Git, command-line tools, and scripting data workflows
Active use of AI-assisted development tools (Claude, Cursor, Copilot, or similar) in your current workflow

Nice To Haves

Experience with land use, zoning, or regulatory data specifically
Familiarity with parcel data sources and assessor records
Background in urban planning, real estate development, or AEC industry
Experience with PostGIS or other spatial databases
Exposure to cloud geospatial workflows (AWS, GCP, or similar)
Experience building agentic or automated data processing workflows
Interest in how regulatory constraints get encoded in data and applied to real projects

Responsibilities

Own and extend GIS data pipelines that process regulatory layers (flood zones, overlay districts, planning boundaries) across dozens of jurisdictions
Add coverage for new cities and counties by identifying authoritative GIS sources, configuring data transformations, and validating output quality
Improve pipeline reliability, monitoring, and error handling for production-grade operation
Build new data workflows for adjacent datasets: parcel boundaries, zoning classifications, permit records
Leverage AI tools to increase development velocity and iterate quickly on data processing workflows
Work with engineering to integrate geospatial data into product features—map visualization, feasibility analysis, constraint detection
Evaluate and adopt modern geospatial tools and formats as the stack evolves
Document data sources, schemas, and processing logic so the system scales beyond one person