Python GIS Engineer (Territory Balancing) - Part-time - LATAM/EMEA/NA

About the role

Contiguo is bringing its sales-territory balancing technology to market and is seeking a contract engineer to harden and extend an existing Python codebase with GIS components. You’ll own the V1 implementation end-to-end—from polygon topology fixes and contiguity enforcement to a reproducible CLI and exports—while collaborating with non-technical stakeholders.

What you’ll build (V1 scope)

• Generalized balancing for any starting territories
  Add/remove territories; re-seed from partial or empty starts
  Honor locked ZIPs (holdouts) and respect ±margin bands
  Maintain contiguity (“blob” territories); eliminate islands/enclaves
• Adjacency & contiguity layer
  Build from US Census TIGER ZCTA polygons + provided neighbor CSVs
• Resilient solver
  Replace/augment greedy/BFS approach with OR-Tools or heuristic/local search that scales with territory counts (min-max deviation, constraints, locks)
• DX & outputs
  CLI + reproducible environment; exports to CSV/GeoJSON/Excel summaries
• Production hygiene
  Tests (pytest), typing, docs, performance profiling

What you’ll do

• Extend and refactor the current Python codebase to deliver the V1 scope above.
• Implement robust polygon topology repair, spatial joins/overlays, and adjacency graph construction.
• Enforce contiguity via component analysis; detect and fix islands/enclaves.
• Design and tune an optimization routine (OR-Tools or custom heuristics) that respects locks and margin constraints.
• Ship a reproducible CLI workflow (env setup, config, deterministic runs) and clean data exports.
• Write unit/integration tests, type annotations, and developer-oriented documentation.
• Profile and optimize bottlenecks (I/O, geometry ops, graph/solver runtime).
• Collaborate with non-technical managers; translate requirements into clear tasks and milestones.

Must-have qualifications

• Python 3.11+ with production habits: pytest, typing, docs, profiling.
• Spatial stack: GeoPandas, Shapely 2.x, PyProj, NetworkX, KDTree.
• Hands-on with polygon topology repair, spatial joins/overlays, and adjacency graph building.
• Contiguity enforcement and component analysis; enclave/island detection & repair.
• Optimization experience: OR-Tools or custom heuristics (min-max deviation, constraints, locks).
• Comfortable shipping a CLI and reproducible environment (virtualenv/Poetry/pip-tools).

Nice to have

• GDAL/Fiona, PostGIS, tiling/quadtrees, or large-scale geometry processing.
• Experience with TIGER/ACS datasets and address/ZIP peculiarities.
• Packaging, CI/CD (pre-commit, Ruff/Black, GitHub Actions), containerization (Docker).
• Light analytics/visualization for QA (e.g., static map outputs).
• Prior work productizing internal geo/optimization tools.