I am thrilled to welcome our new colleague Leo Thomas to Development Seed! Leo joins the team as a Data Engineer and brings with him expertise of developing cloud based tools to make geospatial data accessible to researchers and the scientific community. He will work on our efforts to ingest, catalog and distribute new commercial datasets with groups like NASA and other data providers. I’m excited to get to work with him, and hope you have a chance to welcome him!

Leo is no stranger to tech startup culture. Before joining DevSeed, Leo was based in Beirut, Lebanon working for a drone information tech startup where he refactored their application’s AWS backend by migrating to a NoSQL database and GraphQL API and redeployed all the resources with autoscaling. Before that, Leo was based out of his hometown of Paris, France working for a 3D printing startup.

Having lived around the world, Leo has picked up the knack for languages and speaks French, English and Spanish fluently, and enough Arabic to order his favorite meal: beid qawarma. He prides himself on his culinary talents, but is currently focused on perfecting his sourdough starter, a nod to the San Francisco region where he grew up.

Join me in welcoming Leo, and say hey to him on GitHub! 👋🏼