About Me

I am a cloud engineer at Development Seed, based in Durham, UK. Most of my work is about making Earth observation data easier to use: building the pipelines that turn satellite archives into analysis-ready datasets, and contributing to the open-source tools people use to read them.

What I care about #

I am a strong believer in open source and open data. What attracted me to Development Seed is that its projects make scientific data more accessible, build on open standards and open-source tools, and contribute to environmental monitoring, climate research and open science.

When a tool I depend on has a problem, I would rather fix it upstream than work around it. I have contributed to various projects and tools in the STAC and eoAPI ecosystem, and I started a supply-chain security effort for Development Seed’s open-source repositories.

I also like sharing what I learn. Preparing a talk or a workshop is one of the fastest ways I know to find the gaps in my own understanding, and giving it starts conversations that would never have happened otherwise. In 2026 I spoke at FOSS4G Europe and the UK Earth Observation Conference, and helped run an eoAPI + STAC workshop (more on the talks page). I write about what I learn on this blog.

What I work on #

Since joining Development Seed in November 2025, I have mostly worked on two projects for European agencies.

For ESA’s EOPF Sentinel Zarr Explorer, I worked on the pipelines that converted Sentinel products to GeoZarr and published them in a STAC catalogue, and on the automation that kept a large catalogue in order over time (storage tiers, retention). There is more on the project page.

For EUMETSAT’s Destination Earth Data Lake, I co-wrote the first architecture decision record and the initial plan for onboarding the data, then built a large part of the chain that turns Meteosat imagery into Zarr and Icechunk datacubes. I also wrote the quickstart notebooks that users start from.

On both projects, a good part of the work happens before the pipelines are built: agreeing formats and conventions with the agencies that own the data and the teams who build on it, and choosing designs from benchmarks on the real data.

How I got here #

I spent about ten years (2010–2021) as a physical oceanographer. I did an MSc at Université Pierre et Marie Curie (now Sorbonne Université), a PhD at the Université de Perpignan on deep convection and the upper ocean in the Mediterranean, and a short postdoc at LOCEAN in Paris. I then spent four years at the Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS) in Oban and two at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, working on the North Atlantic Current with gliders and moorings as part of the international OSNAP programme.

A lot of that work was making observations usable by other scientists. I merged 13 hydrographic databases into a Mediterranean climatology and published it as an open dataset. At SAMS I helped plan and run our part of OSNAP, from the cruises to the archived data: I published the UK-OSNAP glider datasets at the British Oceanographic Data Centre, and adapted and maintained the mooring processing toolbox that SAMS still uses on its mooring cruises. The glider and mooring data went into the first OSNAP overturning results, published in Science in 2019, which I co-authored. Along the way I published 30+ peer-reviewed papers, spent about 200 days at sea on 12 research cruises, and learnt a lot about planning and teamwork under pressure.

In 2021 I left research. As a scientist I relied on data systems every day, and I had become more and more curious about how they worked and how to fix them, rather than just reporting issues. I learnt the software side at OSE Engineering, packaging routing algorithms into Python libraries for a delivery-robot prototype, and at the UK Department for Work and Pensions, where I co-architected a secure container platform for data scientists and analysts and mentored junior engineers. At Development Seed, the two sides meet again.

A selection of my papers and datasets is on my CV, and the full list is on Google Scholar.

Outside work #

I run a small homelab with self-hosted services, and I explore the UK and Europe in a campervan with my family 🚐.