Wood PLC | Water Resources / GIS | Chantilly, VA or Remote
Wood's Water Tech team is seeking skilled developers -- including those with civil engineering (hydrology + hydraulics), environmental, or GIS backgrounds -- for a variety of projects in the water resources domain. Write code to help federal, state, and local clients tackle real-world environment & infrastructure issues like climate change resiliency and flood risk.
Based on personal experience, I can't recommend this enough. My original background is in civil and environmental engineering; I discovered my love of programming after I'd been working as a civil engineer for a little while, automating GIS tasks. After that I fell deep down the rabbit hole and found a job as a full-time software developer at age 30. Now I'm back in the civil / environmental industry, but with several years of real world software engineering experience. It's paying off in a big way. I'm not the best programmer, and I'm not the best civil engineer, but I have more experience in both of those things than anyone else I know. Gives me a big leg up in a pretty niche area.
This would be a very big deal in my industry - civil/environmental engineering. In the river/stream flood modeling space, the US Army Corps of Engineers' HEC-RAS program [1] is king. It's a critical part of FEMA's National Flood Insurance Program. HEC-RAS is free, but it's not open source, and USACE doesn't appear to have any plans to make it so.
HEC-RAS is a Windows-only GUI application. Supposedly USACE has an internal Linux version, not publicly available. HEC-RAS has a limited COM API, but it's not officially documented. I suspect that the API was exposed unintentionally. Most of the input files are text, but the format is very strange (very old-school), again with no official documentation. I spend much of my days reverse-engineering HEC-RAS file formats in order to make the process of building flood models more efficient and less error-prone. Other developers like me exist at competing civil engineering firms, working on similar reverse engineering projects and secret sauce tools for HEC-RAS.
If HEC-RAS was made open source, it would be a game changer. We'd be able to accomplish so much more. If the input/output files were officially documented, it would be a game changer. FEMA would benefit tremendously.
Hi, I sent an email to the team in the listing to see if they can provide additional information about the file formats involved in HEC-RAS. Finger-crossed.
Based on your username, you're at US Digital Service? Thanks so much for taking to time to reach out. Glad to see they released a Linux version of the rasUnsteady64 executable! I was able to run the example on WSL! It wasn't there the last time I looked, for sure. There's a lot more to HEC-RAS than that, but it's certainly the most important component.
Mike Bannis has done great work wrapping the HEC-RAS controller and creating parsers some of the file formats. There's a very helpful _unoffcial_ book [1] laying out the win32com control and file format details. Making HEC-RAS open source would allow many more projects like these, with significantly less guesswork.
Yep, I'm with USDS. It's not a problem, I'm glad to help if I can and civil engineering is a bit out of my depth.
Are there anything specific about the formats I should be asking for? I'm assuming there are hundred of different file formats (input and output alike). If I knew more about the file formats, that may make the conversation with the team easier.
10% salary cut. Other people at my company (large civil engineering firm) who can't work remotely have been transitioned to on-call, and about 1000 were laid off. Salaries for highly billable employees are currently unaffected.
Agreed. I was a civil engineer (specializing in water resources) before I became a full-time software developer. The science of hydrology/hydraulics is largely a messy pile of educated guesses, statistical relationships based on embarrassingly small datasets, and highly generalized models.
One of my friends, who is a new developer, and I took out a new Tesla for a spin and the whole time he was saying his time as a programmer makes him trust Tesla's self-driving software. My reaction was closer to "I've worked for some of the Big 4 software companies and my time there makes me not trust any software."
Location: Northern Virginia / Washington DC
Remote: Yes
Willing to relocate: Depends
Technologies: Python (esp. IPython, numpy, Flask, sqlalchemy, pymongo)
JavaScript, HTML/CSS, Git,
analytical GIS (ArcGIS, arcpy, Fiona, QGIS)
Website: http://www.thwllms.com
Email: thwllms at gmail
Resume: Available on request - just shoot me an email.
Passionate coder with a background in civil/environmental engineering. Big fan of GIS. Looking to do something new.
Self-educated, enthusiastic programmer with strong GIS skills and a background in civil/environmental engineering (licensed PE in Virginia). At my current job I write Python for GIS analysis and wrangling hydrologic/hydraulic data, albeit without mentorship or formal processes. I'm happiest at work when I have an active programming project. Looking to join an experienced team where I can learn best practices and continue to build my skill set.
