Sam Silver.

I'm a backend software engineer working toward the geospatial side of the industry — remote sensing, spatial data infrastructure, and the systems that make petabyte-scale Earth observation tractable.

Most of my career has been product engineering adjacent to space: fleet systems at Bird, precision-ag and carbon accounting at Indigo Ag and Regrow, and data-platform engineering at Niantic, where I worked on Airflow scheduling for the team behind Pokémon Go.

I'm moving deeper into the geospatial domain now — cloud-native formats (COG, STAC, PMTiles, FlatGeobuf), the modern geo data stack (DuckDB, Icechunk, Kerchunk, Xarray), and foundation models for Earth observation (Clay, Prithvi, TESSERA, SatCLIP).

Groundstation is where I write about that work, and where I'll publish the projects I build as I go.