IFAD — Geospatial Analysis & Earth Observation Consultant Roster
International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD)
Closes September 28, 2026
Virtual Intelligence Solutions
Virtual Intelligence Solutions Limited is seeking an experienced Geospatial Engineer to help develop the geospatial intelligence layer of a transportation platform. The platform coordinates passengers and moving vehicles across defined transportation routes. The Geospatial Engineer will be responsible for designing and implementing these systems
Job descriptions & requirements
Responsibilities:
Route & Geospatial Architecture:
Design the platform’s geospatial architecture using PostgreSQL/PostGIS.
Convert transportation routes into accurate digital route geometries and service corridors.
Develop geofencing and route-validation functionality.
Determine whether passenger pickup and destination locations can be served by particular routes.
Identify overlapping routes and route intersections.
Develop efficient spatial indexing and querying strategies.
GPS & Vehicle Tracking:
Process real-time GPS data from moving vehicles.
Develop methods for handling inaccurate, noisy or drifting GPS coordinates.
Implement map matching to determine the road/route on which a vehicle is actually travelling.
Determine vehicle direction and route progression.
Develop vehicle-on-route/off-route detection.
Support real-time vehicle-location services.
Routing & Pickup Optimization:
Integrate and/or develop road-network routing capabilities.
Calculate road-based distance and travel time rather than relying solely on straight-line distance.
Determine suitable passenger pickup/drop-off points.
Calculate permissible route deviations.
Support intelligent passenger-to-vehicle matching.
Work with routing technologies such as OSRM, Valhalla, GraphHopper or equivalent.
APIs & Backend Integration:
Develop or support geospatial REST APIs.
Integrate geospatial services with the existing application backend.
Optimize PostGIS queries for real-time operation.
Work with developers responsible for the driver and passenger applications.
Design geospatial services capable of scaling as vehicle and passenger volumes increase.
Requirements:
Bachelor’s degree or higher in one of the following, or equivalent professional experience:
A minimum of 3–5 years of professional geospatial software engineering experience.
Computer Science, Software Engineering, Geoinformatics
Geomatics, Geographic Information Systems
Surveying/Geospatial Engineering, Transportation Engineering
Geography with significant software-development experience
Required Skills
Strong practical experience with:
PostgreSQL/PostGIS
Python
Spatial SQL
GeoPandas
Shapely
GDAL/PROJ
OpenStreetMap
Mapbox and/or Google Maps Platform
Geofencing
Spatial indexing
Coordinate systems and projections
GPS/trajectory data
REST APIs
Road-network data
Candidates should also understand:
Map matching
Network topology
Routing algorithms
Nearest-neighbour spatial searches
Point-to-line and point-in-polygon calculations
Route buffers/corridors
Vehicle heading/direction calculations
High-frequency location data
Highly Desirable
Experience with one or more of the following:
OpenStreetMap routing
GeoServer
GeoDjango
FastAPI
Docker
WebSockets/event-driven location systems
Data Science & ML Collaboration
Work closely with our Data Scientist/ML specialist on:
Passenger-demand analysis
Supply/demand heat maps
Demand forecasting
ETA modelling
Vehicle utilization
Driver positioning
Passenger/vehicle matching
Route-performance analytics
Future optimization models
GIS & Remote Sensing Experts