I’m delighted to welcome Rodrigo to the team! Rodrigo is a software engineer at Development Seed. He works on open source code and infrastructure to access and process geospatial data. Rodrigo is passionate about the intersection between remote sensing and software engineering, and desiring to make satellite imagery more accessible to the global community.

Rodrigo will be contributing to NASA’s Commercial Satellite Data Acquisition Program (CSDAP) which supports NASA Earth data users with access to high-value commercial datasets from entities such as Planet and Spire. He will also be working with NASA on it’s Science Mission Directorate (SMD) catalog, which seeks to expand human knowledge through new scientific discoveries by implementing capabilities that enable open science across scientific disciplines.

Prior to joining Development Seed, Rodrigo worked at UP42, a geospatial marketplace for data and processing. With a team, he built containerized data acquisition and processing blocks, including a deep learning based Land Cover Segmentation algorithm for sub saharan Africa, and a utilities package to enable partners to build blocks better and faster. Previously, Rodrigo worked at Planet where as a sales engineer, he advised customers on how to build solutions on top of satellite imagery, including mangrove management tools and power line right-of-way monitoring systems.

He has a bachelor of science in Agriculture Engineering and a master of science in Geoinformation Science from Wageningen University. For his master thesis he investigated, and published on how to infer the ripeness of apples in an orchard using gas sensors mounted on UAVs.

Rodrigo played the trumpet in a philharmonic band for over 10 years and owns a collection of over 200 postcards (and counting!) from all over the world through Postcrossing. When he’s not tinkering with code or satellite images, he enjoys traveling and cooking with his boyfriend, hosting big dinner parties, going to theaters and museums, and fighting the patriarchy.

Say hi 👋 to Rodrigo on Twitter and welcome him to the team!

Rodrigo at the Open day of the Berlin Art University (UdK) in 2019