Full-Time
Senior System Engineer
NGA
Posted on 9/26/2025
Esri
5,001-10,000 employees
Global GIS software and mapping platform
Compensation Overview
$156k - $239.2k/yr
St. Louis, MO, USA
In Person
Relocation Assistance Program available for candidates moving to the St. Louis, MO area.
US Citizenship, US Top Secret Clearance Required
 IT & Security (1) |
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- 12+ years of professional experience in a similar position supporting similar responsibilities
- Experience designing, implementing and/or administrating enterprise ArcGIS or other comparable IT systems (desktop, server and online)
- Broad system administration experience on Windows and/or Linux
- Working knowledge of at least one scripting or programming language (such as Python, PowerShell, Javascript, C#)
- Familiarity with network concepts and topics (such as domains, directories, DNS, HTTPS, firewalls, proxies, load-balancing)
- Experience with at least one RDBMS, including SQL query writing (such as SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL)
- US citizenship and willingness and ability to maintain a US Security Clearance
- Bachelor's in Computer Science, Mathematics, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) or STEM related field
- Deploy and configure complex ArcGIS in a wide variety of environments across operation systems, cloud providers, security architectures, customer types and organizations, to meet the customer's service level agreement
- Plan and execute the migration of content from one ArcGIS deployment to another, encompassing different architectures, deployment strategies and software components
- Troubleshoot advanced ArcGIS deployments, providing guidance for platform components such as storage, networking and security
- Work closely with customers and partners to identify, design, and certify key GIS workflows for the ArcGIS platform
- Collaborate internally to help customer organizations align their technical objectives and business goals with Esri's technology platform
- Master's in Computer Science, Mathematics, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) or STEM related field
- One or more industry-standard IT certifications (such as Esri, CompTIA, Microsoft, Amazon)
- Experience with Esri software including ArcGIS Enterprise, ArcGIS Desktop, ArcGIS Online, Portal for ArcGIS and ArcGIS Runtime and their associates APIs or interfaces
- Cloud-based system operations (SysOps)
Esri provides geographic information system (GIS) software and services, most notably the ArcGIS platform, which helps people create, analyze, and share maps and spatial data. Users can import data, build maps, run spatial analyses, and deploy dashboards and apps that incorporate maps, real-time feeds, and even AI insights. Esri differentiates itself by remaining privately owned since its founding, focusing on long-term GIS development rather than chasing quick profits, and maintaining a comprehensive, industry-standard suite that is used in urban planning, disaster response, logistics, and conservation. Its stated goal is to help people understand and manage the world through maps by turning data into actionable geographic insight.
Company Size
5,001-10,000
Company Stage
N/A
Total Funding
N/A
Headquarters
Redlands, California
Founded
1969
Simplify's Take
What believers are saying
- GeoAnalytics Engine 2.0 adds raster analytics, March 2026 release.
- UNESCO Sites Navigator integrates NASA FIRMS, USGS for real-time alerts.
- HDR cuts parcel research 50% via ArcGIS for AutoCAD with ReportAll.
What critics are saying
- QGIS displaces ArcGIS in governments within 12-24 months.
- Google Maps Platform undercuts with AI analytics in 18-36 months.
- Databricks native geospatial eliminates ArcGIS need in 24-36 months.
What makes Esri unique
- Esri holds 45% GIS market share since 2015 with ArcGIS platform.
- Founded 1969 by Jack and Laura Dangermond, privately owned without VC.
- Pioneered commercial GIS with Arc/Info in 1980s, evolved to ArcGIS 8.1 in 2001.
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Benefits
Health Insurance
Dental Insurance
Vision Insurance
Life Insurance
401(k) Retirement Plan
401(k) Company Match
Paid Vacation
Paid Holidays
Professional Development Budget
Hybrid Work Options
Company News
How UNESCO monitors 1,248 World Heritage Sites in near real time. The UNESCO World Heritage List protects 1,248 places across 170 countries. Machu Picchu. The Great Barrier Reef. Cologne Cathedral. The Lavaux vineyard terraces. Places so different in climate, geography, and cultural context that a single management approach simply cannot work. And yet the threats to those sites (wildfires, earthquakes, floods, coral bleaching, deforestation) do not respect the boundaries that separate Cultural from Natural sites, or one country's jurisdiction from another's. So how do you keep watch over 1,248 properties with one small team? That was the question UNESCO was solving when they partnered with Esri and with Mapular, an Esri Germany partner, to extend the UNESCO Sites Navigator into a living monitoring platform. The opportunity: global scale, local consequences. World Heritage inscription happens once. Protecting a site happens every day. New hazard datasets become available every year, from higher-resolution satellite feeds to real-time disaster networks like USGS, GDACS, NASA FIRMS, NOAA, and Global Forest Watch. Each of them is useful on its own. The value multiplies when they come together in one place, aligned to the same site geometries, at the same cadence, inside a platform a conservation team can navigate without writing code. That is the opportunity the Sites Navigator was built to capture. Three constraints shaped the brief: * Global coverage, site-level precision. A wildfire near a natural site is not the same as a wildfire near a stone monument. The system must reflect that. * Low-code maintainability. UNESCO's GIS team are conservation and heritage specialists first. They needed a platform their existing staff could own and extend, without developing. * Transparent science. Alerts had to be explainable: why did this site flag, what data did it come from, what threshold was crossed? Over-alerting erodes the credibility of the platform itself. The solution: the UNESCO Sites Navigator, extended. UNESCO and Esri had already built the foundation of the Sites Navigator: a unified map pulling World Heritage Sites, Biosphere Reserves, and Global Geoparks into a single interactive view. Mapular joined to build the environmental risk and alert engine: the part that turns the map from a reference tool into a daily operational instrument. Three pieces came together: * A harmonized sites layer that resolves point-based and polygon-based site records into one consistent geometry set. * An automated alert system that runs scheduled analyses against live hazard feeds and flags each site when attention is warranted. * A dedicated monitoring dashboard and advanced map application built on Esri's out-of-the-box tools so UNESCO's team can maintain everything themselves. From raw hazard feeds to actionable alerts. The alert engine ingests from the organizations whose job it is to watch the planet: * NASA FIRMS for active fires * USGS for earthquakes * GDACS (the UN/European Commission joint system) for tsunami advisories * NOAA Coral Reef Watch for coral bleaching conditions * Global Forest Watch for vegetation disturbance and tree cover loss * WRI Aqueduct for water risk, flood risk, drought, and water stress Each feed is interpreted through thresholds UNESCO's scientific team defined. The system does not guess. Events below the defined severity are ignored. Events above it, within a relevant distance of a site, become an alert. The principle is simple and important: the system flags situations that warrant attention. UNESCO's team, with local context and scientific expertise, decides what to do with them. Why ecological relevance matters. Not every hazard threatens every site in the same way. Coral bleaching is a catastrophe for the Great Barrier Reef and irrelevant for the Cologne Cathedral. So the platform only evaluates bleaching for Natural and Mixed sites. A wildfire close to a stone monument is a structural risk for the monument itself. A wildfire at a similar distance from a forest reserve is a risk to the ecosystem that defines the reserve's value. The platform reflects that difference by applying the appropriate buffer distance for each site category. Decisions like these were not implementation details. They were design choices that turned a generic spatial analysis into a tool that makes sense to conservation scientists. Early warning in practice. On a quiet Tuesday, the notebook runs at its scheduled time. It pulls that day's earthquake list from USGS, fires from NASA FIRMS, and tsunami advisories from GDACS. It determines how far each event could reasonably affect a site and runs a server-side spatial filter against the harmonized sites layer. If any site is affected, its alert flag flips to Yes in the production layer. The monitoring dashboard updates automatically. An email goes out to the UNESCO team, grouped by hazard type, with site names and the specific conditions that triggered the alert. On a noisy Tuesday (a Pacific tsunami warning, a fire season in the Mediterranean, a coral bleaching event in the Caribbean at the same time) the same engine runs. The pattern is the same. The value scales. Why out-of-the-box was non-negotiable. This is the part that matters most for other nonprofits thinking about similar investments. Everything Mapular built sits on Esri's standard platform: ArcGIS Online for hosting, ArcGIS Experience Builder for the web application, ArcGIS Dashboards for monitoring, ArcGIS Notebooks for the scheduled automation, Arcade for pop-up logic. No custom backend. No bespoke front-end framework. No services that only one vendor can keep alive. That matters because nonprofit technology that depends on a specific consulting relationship is fragile. The moment the contract ends or the consultant leaves, the system freezes. UNESCO insisted from day one that everything be maintainable by their in-house GIS team. That constraint shaped every architectural decision. Lessons for other nonprofits. A few patterns from this engagement translate directly to other global nonprofit monitoring programs: * Design for team autonomy, not for the consultant. Out-of-the-box tools are slower to customize than bespoke code, but they last longer and cost less over the decade that matters. * Let scientific expertise drive thresholds, not software defaults. The value of an alert is a function of the thresholds behind it. Generic "anomaly detection" is not useful for conservation work. * Separate the hazard from the interpretation. The platform flags. The humans decide. This keeps trust intact over time, even as data sources change. * Harmonize your entities first, then layer analytics on top. The hardest part of the UNESCO engagement was not the alerting logic, it was producing one consistent geometry layer for every site. Analytics are only as good as the spatial foundation beneath them. Built to grow with the mission. The Sites Navigator was designed to keep evolving alongside UNESCO's wider conservation work. The same foundations that power monitoring of World Heritage Sites today can be extended to other UNESCO designations such as Biosphere Reserves and Global Geoparks, as well as to new data sources as they become available. That flexibility, more than any single alert, is the outcome Mapular is most proud of. Looking to build something similar? Mapular helps nonprofit and conservation organizations plan, build, and maintain monitoring platforms on the ArcGIS ecosystem. If you are thinking about an early-warning system for your own program, Mapular would love to hear what you are protecting and how Mapular can help. Ready to put location intelligence to work? Book a free demo and see Mapular in action.
Mainz implements fully cloud-based Geospatial Data Infrastructure with VertiGIS and Esri. Relaunch creates a powerful, secure, and scalable platform for citizen services and administration. The state capital of Mainz and its municipal data centre (KDZ) have partnered with VertiGIS and Esri Germany to relaunch their Geospatial Data Infrastructure (GDI). The initiative delivers a modern, cloud-based, and security-certified SaaS platform designed to meet today's administrative needs while supporting future digital developments. The technical foundation is built on Esri's ArcGIS Online, a proven standard for modern digital public-sector infrastructures that operates without the need for local servers. VertiGIS Studio, VertiGIS FM, and other additional components of the VertiGIS Neo technology portfolio extend the ArcGIS platform with purpose-built functionality for public administration. This includes web map applications, specialised solutions, and tools for infrastructure management. Together, the platform provides an end-to-end cloud architecture that meets stringent requirements for information security, data protection, and regulatory compliance, while remaining scalable and future ready. With the relaunch, Mainz has created a central, powerful platform for citizen-oriented services and internal WebGIS applications. The cloud-first approach delivers high availability and operational resilience, while simplifying a historically complex system landscape made up of multiple SaaS and managed service components. These have now been consolidated into a single, integrated solution. The new GDI also enables the deployment of specialised applications that streamline day-to-day administrative work. Using modern low-code and no-code technologies, applications can be configured quickly and adapted as requirements evolve, with minimal development effort. A clear data and system architecture ensure transparency, easy maintenance, and futureproofing.
Esri and RoboGarden sign strategic MOU to advance geospatial and geomatics education. Agreement Explores New Models for Digital Learning, Academic Collaboration, and Global Workforce Readiness * Esri and RoboGarden have signed an MOU to explore strategic collaboration that broadens access to modern GIS and geomatics education. * RoboGarden, a Canadian EdTech company, offers gamified and scalable digital learning solutions for academic institutions, governments, and industry. * The MOU outlines joint exploration of academic pathways, improved regional coordination, and potential creation of a Geospatial & Geomatics Virtual Academy. * The agreement focuses on enhancing digital learning delivery, expanding localized e-learning opportunities, and supporting global workforce development in high-demand technology fields. * To stay informed about Esri's education initiatives and resources, visit com/en-Esri Saudi Arabia Ltd./industries/education/overview. REDLANDS, Calif. - March 31, 2026 - Esri, the global leader in geographic information system (GIS) technology, today announced the signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with RoboGarden Inc. The MOU is aimed at expanding geospatial and geomatics education, improving academic collaboration, and strengthening global workforce readiness. Specifically, this new agreement establishes a framework for Esri and RoboGarden to evaluate new approaches for scalable digital learning, regional responsiveness, and curriculum-aligned academic pathways. The MOU's four strategic objectives include: creation of a geospatial and geomatics virtual academy, stronger regional execution and responsiveness, academic partnership pathways, and localized esri e-learning opportunities. Organizations across industries will benefit from this initiative, such as business, government agencies, academia, as well as individual learners seeking job-ready skills in GIS. "Esri's MOU with RoboGarden creates an important opportunity to explore new models for academic collaboration, digital learning delivery, and regional access that can help prepare the next generation of geospatial professionals," said Esri President, Jack Dangermond. "This MOU represents a strategic step toward reimagining how hands on and practical geospatial/geomatics skills are developed and delivered at scale," said Mohamed Elhabiby, Co-Founder and President of RoboGarden Inc. "By exploring a virtual academy on the RoboGarden platform, deeper academic collaboration, and localized digital learning pathways, we are laying the foundation for accessible, practical, and globally relevant GIS education that better serves institutions, industries, and learners worldwide." To learn more about Esri's education solutions and geospatial learning resources, visit esri.com/en-Esri Saudi Arabia Ltd./industries/education/overview. About Esri Esri, the global market leader in geographic information system (GIS) software, location intelligence, and mapping, helps customers unlock the full potential of data to improve operational and business results. Founded in 1969 in Redlands, California, USA, Esri software is deployed in hundreds of thousands of organizations globally, including Fortune 500 companies, government agencies, nonprofit institutions, and universities. Esri has regional offices, international distributors, and partners providing local support in over 100 countries on six continents. With its pioneering commitment to geospatial technology and analytics, Esri engineers the most innovative solutions that leverage a geographic approach to solving some of the world's most complex problems by placing them in the crucial context of location. Visit Esri Saudi Arabia Ltd. at esri.com. Jo Ann Pruchniewski Public Relations, Esri
What's New for the R-ArcGIS Bridge (spring 2026). By Martha Bass and Josiah Parry The R-ArcGIS Bridge continues to evolve as a powerful way to connect R developers with the ArcGIS ecosystem, and the past few months have been especially exciting. From presentations and collaboration at the 2026 Esri Developer & Technology Summit to new releases across the {arcgis} packages, Esri is making it easier than ever to build full-stack spatial workflows in R. Esri'll cover: * Esri's Dev & Tech Summit * New features & package releases * What Esri is planning for User Conference this summer Dev & Tech Summit 2026. At this year's Esri Developer & Technology Summit, the R-ArcGIS Bridge team presented at the plenary and hosted two a technical workshop and demo theater session focused on integration and full-stack spatial development with R. These presentations emphasized a common theme: bringing R closer to the ArcGIS system - not just for analysis, but for building production-ready applications and services. Plenary. In the plenary demo, Esri showed how the R-ArcGIS Bridge can create ArcGIS-powered applications all from R. The demo focused on calling ArcGIS web tools directly from R, and using that tool inside a Shiny application. By combining new web tool support with integration of the Calcite Design System, the app demonstrated how R-based tools can feel like a natural extension of the ArcGIS ecosystem. If you're interested in the code and examples from the plenary, they're available on GitHub: Plenary Resources Full-Stack Spatial with R and ArcGIS. The technical session went deeper into the mechanics of building end-to-end spatial workflows using the R-ArcGIS Bridge. This session walked through: * Managing feature services from R * Authenticating against ArcGIS Online or Enterprise * Performing scalable geocoding * Using R to build Shiny applications that integrate ArcGIS services and the Calcite Design System The session culminated in a Shiny app that tied these pieces together, demonstrating how spatial data scientists can move from data access and analysis to interactive, shareable applications without leaving R. All workshop materials, example scripts, and slides are available here: Full-Stack Spatial Resources Powering arcgis apps with R. Esri also presented a Demo Theater session focused on practical automation workflows using the R-ArcGIS Bridge. This session highlighted how the {arcgis} metapackage can be used to access, transform, and maintain the data that feed ArcGIS applications, with a particular emphasis on ArcGIS Dashboards. The demo covered * reading from a feature service * accessing and reverse geocoding a CSV portal item, * adding new features to a feature service * showing how R can serve as the "engine" behind automated updates to authoritative data sources. If you weren't able to attend Dev & Tech Summit - or just want to revisit the material - Esri encourage you to explore the full repository: 2026 Dev Summit resources New features in the R packages. Alongside Dev & Tech Summit, Esri released a significant set of updates across the R-ArcGIS Bridge packages. The 2026 Q1 release represents a major step forward in full-stack spatial development with R, with improvements driven directly by community feedback. Deeper Shiny integration with {calcite}. A major focus of this release is making it easier to build polished, ArcGIS-styled Shiny applications. The {calcite} package has been revamped with hand-crafted R bindings for Calcite components, making the experience feel native to R and Shiny. With these updates, you can: * Use Calcite UI components such as alerts, accordions, date pickers, sliders, and switches * Build layouts with helpers like page_navbar and page_sidebar * Access component state directly from Shiny inputs * Explore over 20 interactive examples included with the package These improvements are designed to help R developers build applications that look and feel consistent with the broader ArcGIS platform. Calling geoprocessing services from R. Another major addition is native support for ArcGIS geoprocessing (GP) services in the {arcgisutils} package. You can now call hosted or custom GP services directly from R, with support for: * Asynchronous job execution * Job status tracking and result retrieval * Type-safe interfaces built on modern R object systems This makes it possible to integrate ArcGIS analysis services and your own published web tools directly into R scripts and Shiny applications, without re-implementing server-side logic. Simplified content access. Accessing ArcGIS content from R has also been streamlined. The arc_open function now accepts both ArcGIS URLs and item IDs, reducing friction when working with hosted layers, services, and other content. This improvement makes it even easier to move between ArcGIS and R. For full details on everything included in the 2026 Q1 release, including package-specific changelogs, see: What's New in R-ArcGIS Bridge (2026 Q1) Esri has updated the R-ArcGIS Bridge documentation site to reflect these new capabilities, including new sections covering portal functions, attachments, and more. Take a look at the refreshed documentation here: R-ArcGIS Bridge documentation What's next. Looking ahead, there's more on the horizon. Esri is actively working on: * Supporting routing services in a dedicated {arcgisrouting} package Esri is excited about how these changes will further expand what's possible with R and ArcGIS, and Esri'll share more details as they take shape. Thank you to everyone who joined Esri at Dev & Tech Summit, shared feedback, and continues to build with the R-ArcGIS Bridge. Esri is looking forward to continuing the conversation and seeing many of you in person at Esri UC later this year! announcements developers arcgis developers calcite design system devsummit 2026 r-arcgis bridge spatial analysis and data science developers Martha Bass Martha Bass is a Product Engineer on the Spatial Statistics team at Esri. Josiah Parry Josiah Parry is a Senior Product Engineer in Spatial Analytics and Data Science and helps lead the R-ArcGIS Bridge project.
What's new in ArcGIS GeoAnalytics Engine 2.0. By Sarah Battersby and Priscilla Kim In the ArcGIS GeoAnalytics Engine 2.0 release (March 2026), Esri has several exciting advances to expand the datasets that you can work with, and to enhance the analytic potential of your big data spatial workflows. The latest release includes a new raster data type, a variety of raster functions and tools, and several improvements in performance and usability. This 2.0 version also introduces some breaking changes that may impact your existing workflows established with the 1.x releases of GeoAnalytics Engine. Let's take a look at the new features and the major changes with the GeoAnalytics Engine 2.0 release: Incorporate raster analytics in your geoanalytics workflows. Esri has heard your feedback about the great analyses that can be done at scale with vector data in GeoAnalytics Engine, but what about your raster data? In GeoAnalytics Engine 2.0, Esri has introduced a new raster data type for storing both raster values and raster references in Spark DataFrames. With these additions, you can read from common raster file types (e.g., GeoTIFF, Cloud Optimized GeoTIFF, and PNG) and use more than 30 new raster functions and tools. The new raster data type, along with the tools that support both raster and vector analysis, also make it easy to perform analyses like summarizing raster values within vector-defined zones to support critical workflows such as computing zonal statistics. This enhancement helps you calculate metrics such as mean drought index per county, year to year variability in environmental conditions, or average risk scores for each parcel of interest. And it can be done at scale to support workflows from environmental monitoring to insurance risk modeling and beyond. As organizations increasingly centralize their raster and vector analytics within big data platforms, efficient zonal statistics become even more valuable and offer a scalable, repeatable way to connect pixel-level information with the geographic units that drive real-world decision-making. With GeoAnalytics Engine's ability to connect to your ArcGIS data stores, results from analyses at scale can be written out for use across the ArcGIS ecosystem. Performance and usability improvements. In addition to the new raster capabilities, GeoAnalytics Engine 2.0 also introduces several performance and usability improvements. These include: * Enabling generation of spatially optimized parquet for more efficient display of features for downstream visualization. Using the with_geodisplay DataFrame extension, you can now generate and use large spatial datasets for optimized rendering with ArcGIS Maps SDK for JavaScript and other GeoDisplay-compatible mapping tools. * Adding H3 hexagons as a binning option when working with the Summarize Within tool in addition to the existing options of either summarizing into Esri square/hexagon bins or polygon that you provide. * Simplifying map formatting with the plot functionality so that the axes can easily be removed from the image. * Adding support for new Apache Spark versions and related cloud runtimes. The GeoAnalytics Engine 2.0 release includes new compatibility with Spark 4.1.x, Databricks 18.0 and 18.1 (beta), and AWS EMR 7.11 and 7.12. Breaking changes. With the release of GeoAnalytics Engine 2.0 there are some changes that may break workflows generated in the 1.x releases of the product. Many of these changes are related to legacy parameter naming so you may not notice many of these changes in your workflows. Esri has full documentation of the breaking changes, with examples of the mitigation steps, across the GeoAnalytics Engine documentation, the release notes, and in the GeoAnalytics Engine Community. Get the latest updates. ArcGIS GeoAnalytics Engine is updated several times a year to make spatial analytics a seamless part of your data science workflows. Esri is always looking forward to hearing from you about the features you need for your big data spatial analytics! developers arcgis geoanalytics engine what's new arcgis geoanalytics engine Sarah Battersby Sarah is a Product Manager for ArcGIS GeoAnalytics Engine. She has a PhD in Geography / Cognitive Science from UC Santa Barbara, and enjoys finding ways to make spatial technologies easier to use, understand, and trust. Priscilla Kim Priscilla is an Associate Product Marketing Manager for ArcGIS Dashboards and ArcGIS GeoAnalytics Engine. She focuses on connecting powerful ArcGIS capabilities with customer needs.