Geospatial Careers
A research and product prototype for the spatial-data field: where its roles are, what they pay, what they demand, and who its map leaves out. Publication is held while the public data and deployment gates are repaired.
- Period
- 2024–present
- Status
- Publication held
- Role
- Founder and lead developer
- Scale
- Labour market and community
- I1Public job evidence
- I2Taxonomies + place
- I3Explicit source records
- O1Career intelligence
- O2Visible evidence boundaries
Founder and lead developer
- A prototype interface backed by a three-layer PostGIS and dbt research platform; the current production surface is not represented as publication-ready.
- A provenance- and licence-aware ingestion path spanning job advertisements and official salary evidence, with public corpus magnitudes withheld until publication gates pass.
- Metric perturbation checks and certified marts that separate exploratory analysis from claims suitable for release.
- A methodology and claims registry that attach source date, denominator, confidence language and known limits to every publishable result.
It is not a complete or unbiased census of the profession. The current publication candidate is blocked while source attribution, rights and production release evidence are reconciled, so no corpus magnitude on this portfolio should be read as a released dataset claim.
Anyone deciding whether to enter, move within, or hire for the geospatial profession is working blind. Job information is scattered across dozens of boards, salary figures are opaque or self-reported, and the field's own map, where its work concentrates and where it thins out, has never been drawn honestly. The task was to build one trustworthy instrument for the field, under a hard data constraint: the honest data is narrow and the plentiful data is not licensable.
My contribution
I designed and built the product and its data platform as founder and lead developer. The architecture separates raw research inputs, transformed evidence and certified public marts in PostGIS and dbt. Collectors retain source and rights metadata; an occupation crosswalk links free-text titles to standard classifications; quality checks, perturbation tests and a claims registry prevent unsupported figures from reaching a public surface. The current publication candidate is being held while provenance, licensing and production-deployment gates are reconciled.
Decisions and constraints
Decisions I made
- Keep fine-grained spatial demand exploratory while its result remains too source-sensitive to publish as settled fact.
- Exclude high-volume datasets whose provenance or reuse terms do not support a defensible public release.
- Use official salary evidence where coverage supports comparison, and state its geographic and disclosure bias instead of filling gaps with weak proxies.
- Fail closed: withhold dataset magnitudes and public metrics while attribution, rights, quality or deployment evidence is unresolved.
Operating constraint
Government salary surveys are reliable but sparse; aggregated job postings are abundant but selection-biased, geographically skewed, and frequently unusable under their terms of service. Public trust had to be built from the narrow, honest end of the data rather than the large, cheap end.
Claim boundary: It is not a complete or unbiased census of the profession. The current publication candidate is blocked while source attribution, rights and production release evidence are reconciled, so no corpus magnitude on this portfolio should be read as a released dataset claim.
What can be checked.
- A prototype interface backed by a three-layer PostGIS and dbt research platform; the current production surface is not represented as publication-ready.
- A provenance- and licence-aware ingestion path spanning job advertisements and official salary evidence, with public corpus magnitudes withheld until publication gates pass.
- Metric perturbation checks and certified marts that separate exploratory analysis from claims suitable for release.
- A methodology and claims registry that attach source date, denominator, confidence language and known limits to every publishable result.