Our mission

Earthmover builds cloud data infrastructure for the heaviest scientific workloads of our time: climate and weather, Earth observation, genomics, ML, and large-scale AI research. Our mission: to empower people to use scientific data to solve humanity's greatest challenges. Our platform supports multidimensional array data at scale, with correctness, performance, and scientific reproducibility at its core.

The platform consists of four major components:

1. Icechunk: our open-source Rust-based array database that underpins the entire system.
2. Arraylake: a cloud-native data lake for multidimensional scientific array data, offering versioning, cataloging, access control, and collaboration.
3. Marketplace: An exchange where data providers can share their scientific data with commercial and academic users.
4. Compute: data-proximate compute that serves multidimensional datasets to clients and applications.

We are long-time contributors to the scientific data ecosystem through projects such as Zarr, Xarray, Icechunk, and xpublish. As we expand Earthmover and introduce new capabilities, we're focused on problems that matter deeply to scientific users:

• Fast, transparent array access along any dimension
• Correctness and isolation over highly concurrent workloads
• Search, discoverability, and cross-organization collaboration
• Performance, stability, and scalability across cloud and on-prem environments
• Public datasets that can meaningfully accelerate global scientific work
• Intuitive navigation and visualization of complex hierarchical scientific structures
• Highly available, multi-region APIs for data delivery

As a scientific data platform company, we have two primary goals: deliver a world-class array storage and processing system, and build an exceptional collaborative experience on top of it. We've established a strong foundation; the next phase is shipping features and products that directly unblock scientific and analytical work at scale.

Job description

As of 2026, Icechunk, the open source foundation of the Earthmover platform, has been gaining adoption in the scientific computing space in both private sector and public sector use cases. Examples include:

• NOAA
• NASA
• EPRI (Electric Power Research Institute)
• Labs at University of Wisconsin / Boise State / Southern Miss
• The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute
• AI Weather forecasting companies (Brightband, Zeus AI, Spire, etc.)

We are looking for a Forward Deployed engineer that can embed with teams building out their next-gen cloud native scientific computing platforms. This engineer will be responsible for gathering and articulating feature requests for Icechunk from stakeholders in industry and government, working with the broader Earthmover team to evolve Icechunk towards those requirements, and contributing much of the code that will improve its fit and function for operational users.

Responsibilities

• Acts as the primary bridge between complex scientific user needs and the Earthmover platform, designing and implementing high-performance, cloud-native features and APIs.
• Able to communicate with or embed within cross-organizational teams using Icechunk to gather requirements for the Icechunk roadmap.
• Work within the Earthmover team to extend the capabilities of Icechunk for new use cases and scale requirements, including technical design, documentation, reciprocal code reviews and project roadmapping.
• Provide input to the overall Icechunk roadmap, and work to deliver new features for the library in collaboration with the community.
• Help teams adopting Icechunk to design and optimize their implementations. This may take the form of designs, PoCs, evaluations, trainings, feedback and others.
• General data engineering in service of testing, prototyping, and special projects.

What we're looking for

• 5+ years of backend or data engineering experience.
• 1+ years of professional Rust experience (async Rust is a strong plus).
• Proven experience working in scientific Python projects. OSS contributions are a plus.
• Experience building and testing scientific data datasets and/or pipelines.
• Product-minded and enjoy working directly with both scientists and software engineers to shape features around real workflows.
• Are excited about the mission (above), even if you haven't worked with every technology or responsibility listed. We have a strong team and can help the right candidate grow into parts of the role.
• Prefer experience working in scientific computing in a US government lab or agency.
• Additional requirements:
  • US citizen, background check required
  • 100% remote available; some time spent working onsite if there is an Earthmover office local to the employee
  • Working day will need significant Eastern time zone coverage, not incompatible with PT but challenging from HI
  • Light travel required: bi-annual Earthmover offsites and occasional customer meetings, conferences and events

Our stack

• Cloud: Primarily AWS; also supporting Google Cloud and on-prem deployments
• Languages: Python and Rust for services and array storage; Python for client libraries
• Infra: Pulumi (TypeScript) for IaC
• Frontend: Next.js deployed on Vercel