Earth Observation AI Engineer

EO AI Engineer (Agents & Integrations)

Office location: Rome, Italy – Pi Campus. Full-time position.

Project specifics

• EVE (Earth Virtual Expert) is being developed by Pi School, with support from Mistral AI and Imperative Space, for ESA Phi-lab.
• EVE is evolving from a text‑based EO assistant into a multimodal, agentic platform under ESA Phi-lab, serving as Europe’s main knowledge nexus between Earth AI models, data, tools, and resources.
• The project is fully open source, with the aim of publishing code, models, and documentation across several public venues (GitHub, Hugging Face Hub, ESA Phi‑lab).
• Core workstreams:
  • Agentic framework: tool calling, planning, multi‑agent orchestration.
  • Multimodal expansion: satellite imagery understanding.
  • Community ecosystem: open tool registry for EO.
  • ESA platform integrations: APEx, EarthCODE, CDSE.
• Discover more at eve.philab.esa.int.

Responsibilities

• Integrate EO data and services into EVE (STAC, openEO, Copernicus APIs, imagery, weather) behind natural‑language queries.
• Build agentic EO pipelines: route queries, break down tasks, call backends, return coherent answers.
• Design and wire specialized EO sub‑agents where needed (for example a data‑retrieval agent over CDSE or SentinelHub).
• Support integrations with other ESA EO projects and platforms as scoped with the team.
• Help the community ecosystem: short tutorials, notebooks, and docs so others can plug tools into EVE.

Requirements

• The EO/geospatial stack: STAC, openEO, OGC APIs, CDSE or SentinelHub, Google Earth Engine, xarray, rasterio, or similar. Comfortable navigating satellite data catalogues and processing pipelines.
• EO data formats and standards: GeoTIFF, NetCDF, COG, STAC metadata, CWL/OGC Application Packages, FAIR data principles.
• Solid Python engineering and experience building data‑intensive applications or pipelines.
• REST API design and integration with external services.
• Docker and Linux, including cloud or HPC environments.
• Excellent proficiency in English.

Bonus points

• LLM‑based agents or tool‑using systems (function calling, multi‑step orchestration, prompt engineering for structured outputs).
• Remote sensing foundation models (Terramind, Prithvi, CLIP‑based EO models).
• RAG systems (vector databases, retrieval pipelines).
• Satellite image processing and analysis.
• CWL workflow authoring or OGC API Processes.
• Open‑source contributions in the EO or AI space.

Benefits and Perks

• Fresh fruit and snacks.
• Access to the pool and Turkish bath.
• Sports activities: gym and pilates.
• Free time in between your tasks to work on your personal projects.
• Access to the Pi Campus parties and gatherings.

Diversity

At Pi School, we proudly embrace and celebrate each individual’s unique qualities in our team, regardless of race, sexual orientation, gender identity, or other differences. We recognise that these diverse perspectives empower us to overcome challenges, foster innovation, and drive excellence. As an inclusive and equal opportunity employer, we are committed to cultivating an environment where everyone feels welcome, valued, and supported to achieve their full potential.