Kelsey Jordahl
Principal Engineer, Core Imagery at Planet
Spokane, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolKelsey Jordahl is a Principal Engineer specializing in core imagery and geospatial software with 16 years of experience combining scientific computing and production engineering. Based in Spokane, she brings deep domain expertise in Python, GIS, multibeam sonar, reflection seismology, gravity, satellite altimetry, and lithospheric deformation to building reliable imagery systems at Planet. An active open-source contributor, she has improved flagship projects like Rasterio—adding an interactive IPython-backed CLI for raster exploration—and enhanced GeoPandas plotting and documentation to make geospatial analysis more accessible. Trained through a Ph.D. from MIT, she pairs rigorous academic research instincts with pragmatic engineering, often surfacing subtle usability improvements that accelerate analysis for scientists and developers alike.
16 years of coding experience
B.S., B.S. at Eckerd CollegePh.D., Ph.D. at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Github Skills (9)
pandas10
command-line-interface10
ipython10
geospatial10
python10
shapely10
cli10
matplotlib10
gdal7
Programming languages (4)
Github contributions (5)
geopandas/geopandas
Jul 2013 - Dec 2016
Python tools for geographic data
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 review, 344 commits, 58 PRs in 3 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Kelsey's commits primarily focused on enhancing the GeoPandas library's functionality and documentation. They added the ability to pass plot options from GeoDataFrames to GeoSeries methods, implemented the plotting of points, lines, and MultiLineString geometries, and enabled coloring of polygons based on data from a specified column. Furthermore, the user added examples, refactored plotting code into a separate module, and significantly improved documentation.
pythongeographygeographic-datapython-toolsgeopandas
rasterio/rasterio
May 2015 - May 2015
Rasterio reads and writes geospatial raster datasets
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:10 commits, 2 PRs, 11 comments in 2 days
Contributions summary:Kelsey primarily contributed to the `rio insp` command-line interface feature within the rasterio project. Their work focused on integrating an IPython interpreter to allow interactive exploration of raster datasets. They added command-line flags, implemented error handling, and refined the integration to ensure the correct execution and usability of the interactive environment. Further contributions included documentation updates for the newly added features.
rasteriopythongeospatialmapbox-satellite-ossraster
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.