Meet Daniel Wiesmann, a product manager who seamlessly bridges the gap between science, code, and customer needs to create impactful geospatial tools.

Daniel’s journey into Earth Observation (EO) data began with a simple digital map he created to visualize his research results. This ignited a passion for mapping, guiding his career for over a decade. Today, Daniel is at the forefront of building cloud-based geospatial software, combining Data Science, EO, and Artificial Intelligence to tackle pressing social and environmental challenges.

With a Ph.D. in Sustainable Energy Systems from the Technical University of Lisbon and an MSc in Physics from ETH Zurich, Daniel’s research has taken him to world-renowned institutions, including CERN, MIT, and the University of Cambridge.

His core focus is making EO data more efficient and scalable in continuous monitoring applications across diverse projects. His contributions to the geographical module of the Django web framework illustrate Daniel's commitment to open technology and open data. In 2017, Daniel co-founded Tesselo leveraging open data and artificial intelligence for forecasting and mitigating environmental phenomena. Although, Tesselo eventually closed, they have open-sourced the core of their work.

Daniel is known for his eagerness to explore new ideas, making him a valuable green-field thinker at Development Seed. His colleagues recognize him as a technical powerhouse and an effective project manager. On the Clay Foundation Model project, Daniel developed the stacchip library to create a scalable data pipeline for foundational model training. He also produced tutorials for tasks like wildfire detection and above-ground biomass estimation. His work in the WAVE (Water Attribution and Variability Experiment) Labs project supported algorithm development that directly benefitted the ESA WHIS project, showcasing his ability to translate innovative ideas into real-world applications.

Daniel’s leadership was also pivotal in the pixel-based segmentation project, where his team built a model in just two weeks that outperformed a previous model developed over two months. These results were shared with the broader community at Big Data from Space (BiDS’23) published proceedings.

Committed to community and shared growth, Daniel is always ready to help others by debugging issues or mentoring team members. His expertise in geospatial data and scalable datasets and his collaborative spirit make him an invaluable part of our team.

Outside of work, Daniel enjoys cycling, relaxing at the beach in Lisbon, and cooking for his family. He said he thrives in Development Seed’s environment, which values solving hard engineering problems in the open and embraces a culture of distributed leadership and asynchronous work across continents.

We are fortunate to have Daniel on our team. His passion, expertise, and collaborative spirit drive meaningful change. You can connect with Daniel and learn more about his work at SatSummit Lisbon this November.