Sara Safavi
Head Of Engineering at Recast
Austin, Texas, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSara Safavi is a Head of Engineering with 13 years of experience building, stabilizing, and scaling resilient teams across geospatial and developer-experience domains. Based in Austin, she has led engineering and developer experience organizations at Recast, Perennial, Userfront, and Planet, combining hands-on backend expertise with people-first leadership. Her technical roots in geospatial engineering include contributions to GeoNode and Planet projects—implementing GeoServer integrations and satellite imagery processing workflows such as NDVI and coordinate transforms. She excels at bridging developer tooling and production systems, turning complex geospatial data pipelines into reliable, user-friendly platforms. Early-career roles from CoreLogic to the Peace Corps reflect a blend of domain depth and practical teaching experience that informs her collaborative approach.
13 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Postbaccalaureate certificate, Geographic Information Systems, Postbaccalaureate certificate, Geographic Information Systems at Penn State UniversityBA, Geography, BA, Geography at Auburn University
Github Skills (20)
sens10
postgresql10
python10
django10
matplotlib10
rasterio10
gis10
api10
jupyter-notebook10
data-analysis10
json9
numpy9
apidoc9
geoserver9
satellite-imagery9
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
planetlabs/notebooks
Sep 2017 - Oct 2022
interactive notebooks from Planet Engineering
Role in this project:
Data Scientist
Data ScientistContributions:15 reviews, 61 commits, 44 PRs in 5 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Sara primarily focused on transforming image data, specifically converting (x,y) coordinates to (lat, lng) using geographic coordinate systems. They implemented code to process and derive insights from remote sensing data using techniques like NDVI calculations. Further, the user demonstrated the ability to process and analyze PlanetScope satellite imagery, and created visualizations of those analytical results, using tools like Rasterio and Matplotlib.
apidata-analysispythonsatellite-imageryplanet
GeoNode/geonode
Jun 2016 - Jun 2017
GeoNode is an open source platform that facilitates the creation, sharing, and collaborative use of geospatial data.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:40 commits, 28 PRs, 6 pushes in 1 year
Contributions summary:Sara primarily contributed to the back-end of the GeoNode project. Their work involved using Django JSON encoders to handle decimal types and modifying database interactions. They also addressed code related to GeoServer integration, specifically with cache invalidation and configuration, demonstrating an understanding of geospatial data processing. Additionally, the user updated project dependencies and configurations.
pythondjangosharingfacilitatesgis
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.