Nathaniel Kelso
Engineering Manager at Applied Intuition
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNathaniel Kelso is an engineering manager and award-winning cartographer with 14+ years delivering production map platforms and location services for companies from Snapchat and Apple to National Geographic. He led the launch of Snap Map’s in-house map stack serving 350M monthly users and previously helped create the open Tilezen vector tiles and the widely used Natural Earth public-domain basemap. Nathaniel combines hands-on GIS engineering, data pipeline optimization, and product leadership—having driven SQL and indexing improvements for vector tiles, large-scale gazetteers, and multi-year strategic roadmaps with measurable cost and engagement impacts. He mentors distributed teams, manages multi-million-dollar vendor relationships, and translates complex spatial requirements into pragmatic workflows. Equally at home with cartographic design and backend tooling, he brings a rare mix of artistic mapcraft and DevOps/data-engineering chops. Based in San Francisco, he’s an active open-source maintainer and community builder who quietly shaped much of today’s open mapping ecosystem.
14 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) Geography, Bachelor of Arts (B.A.) Geography at Cal Poly Humboldt
Stackoverflow
16reputation
121reached
1answer
0questions
Github Skills (16)
openstreetmap10
spatial10
databases10
postgresql10
sql10
python10
data-processing10
spatial-data10
database10
data-pipelines9
data-pipeline9
data-management9
gis9
vector-tiles9
cartography8
Programming languages (22)
Github contributions (5)
nvkelso/natural-earth-vector
Jan 2012 - Jun 2022
A global, public domain map dataset available at three scales and featuring tightly integrated vector and raster data.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:8 releases, 94 reviews, 1217 commits in 10 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Nathaniel's contributions primarily involved updating and adding Natural Earth quick start files, which likely involved data management, schema adjustments, and creating utility scripts using Python. The commits indicate a focus on preparing release updates and packaging shapefiles, including the creation of zip files for distribution, suggesting backend and potentially DevOps skills. The changes also indicate a need for knowledge of spatial data formats, as evidenced by the shapefile operations.
integratedpublic-domainrasterdatasetnaturalearthdata
tilezen/vector-datasource
Jul 2015 - Mar 2022
Tilezen vector tile service - OpenStreetMap data in several formats
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Data Engineer
Back-end Developer & Data EngineerContributions:41 releases, 548 reviews, 1181 commits in 6 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Nathaniel primarily contributed to the backend functionality of the Tilezen vector tile service. Their commits demonstrate expertise in modifying and optimizing SQL queries, particularly in the context of OpenStreetMap data processing. They added support for new data elements and implemented performance improvements, including the addition of indexes. Furthermore, they integrated new data columns and refined various aspects of the data transformation pipeline.
pythonfltkmap-editortilesetmapzen
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