Earth Observation AI Engineer
About Pi School
Pi School is on a mission to empower businesses and professionals to leverage AI’s transformative capabilities. We believe technology should be an enabler, not a barrier, and it should empower individuals and businesses to grow, innovate, and stay connected. We strive for a world where AI and human potential coexist harmoniously, reshaping the way we work, learn, and prosper.
Born in 2017 from the expertise of Translated, an industry pioneer with over two decades of leadership in AI + human translation, Pi School has helped over 100 companies integrate AI solutions to improve their operations, enhance decision-making, and achieve sustainable growth.
Pi School remains at the forefront of the ever-evolving AI landscape and collaborates with prominent research centres and organisations worldwide, such as the European Space Agency (ESA) and the European Commission, to harness AI for both cutting-edge research and practical solutions, driving progress in science and beyond. Our approach is founded on purposeful, impactful work, leveraging technology as a force for good.
We are looking for an EO AI Engineer (Agents & Integrations) to work in our office in Rome.
Pi School's AI research team is building EVE (Earth Virtual Expert), an open-source AI platform for Earth Observation, developed for the European Space Agency. We are looking for an engineer at the intersection of EO data engineering and AI-powered agents to help design, build, and integrate EVE's connections to the ESA ecosystem: satellite data catalogues, processing platforms (APEx, EarthCODE), Copernicus services, and geospatial tooling.
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 (for example GitHub, the Hugging Face Hub, and 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
You will be part of Pi School's AI Research team full-time, connecting AI to real EO data and services. In this role, you will:
- 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
Hands-on experience with:
- The EO/geospatial stack: STAC, openEO, OGC APIs, CDSE or SentinelHub, Google Earth Engine, xarray, rasterio, or similar. You should be 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
Bonus points if you have experience with:
- 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.
Our office
Pi School is hosted at Pi Campus, a working environment immersed in nature. Six luxury villas in Rome (Italy) have been converted into functional offices to foster talent growth. Pi Campus is also a venture firm created by Translated to reinvest part of its profits into promising AI startups.
Benefits and Perks
Our working environment is both relaxed and intense. We are passionate about our mission, and our work is highly regarded in our industry.
- 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
Learn more about our company: https://picampus-school.com/.
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.