Radley Ciego
Data Engineer · Geospatial · Climate Risk
Experience
R&D Geospatial Data Engineer II Jan 2024 – Present
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (U.S. Dept. of Energy)
- Engineered and deployed a modular, Prefect-orchestrated ETL pipeline suite for the C-HER project on ORNL's CHER HPC, automating the ingestion, conversion, and standardization of large-scale exposomic datasets — including H3-indexed radon predictions, EAGLE-I power outage time series, and Census TIGER road network shapefiles — from RustFS object storage into zstd-compressed, analytics-ready Parquet format for downstream ML and deep learning workflows
- Designed and implemented schema normalization, versioning, and column metadata workflows under C-HER to resolve cross-dataset inconsistencies across heterogeneous multimodal geospatial data sources, enforcing standardized schemas aligned with ORNL's HERMIT data catalog system and hive-partitioned storage architecture
- Engineered automated ETL pipelines processing multi-terabyte research datasets into ML-ready columnar format (Parquet) on S3-compatible object storage with hive-partitioned schemas and versioned metadata for cross-institutional research teams
- Served as data architect for cross-functional research teams across 3+ multi-institutional projects spanning environmental exposure modeling, critical infrastructure analysis, and health research
- Debugged and remediated production failures in a distributed Python scraper pipeline deployed on Kubernetes-managed Airflow workers, resolving SSL, parser, schema, and coordinate mismatches across the EAGLE-I national grid monitoring platform
Mapping and Spatial Records Specialist Feb 2023 – Jan 2024
NYC Department of City Planning
- Maintained the official City Map and Zoning Map datasets in ArcMap (ArcGIS), updating digital coverages following approved rezonings and City Map amendments
- Prepared sketch maps for proposed zoning and City Map changes distributed to community boards, borough presidents, City Planning Commission, and City Council
- Processed land use applications for zoning map changes and special development approvals
- Enforced spatial data quality standards and governance protocols across official mapping datasets
Topographic Engineer & Planner Jun 2021 – Feb 2023
Office of the Bronx Borough President
- Managed the Bronx Topographic Bureau and oversaw its daily operations per NYC Charter §82(3); maintained the official Bronx Borough Map, reviewed engineering drawings, and approved City Map alterations through ULURP
- Assigned and verified street addresses; determined legal street status, ownership, and dimensions for public improvement projects; served as consulting engineer providing technical assistance on capital projects and interagency coordination
Projects
Mobility Resilience Under Extreme Weather 2026
- Designed a causal inference framework using Difference-in-Differences with zone and time fixed effects, estimating a statistically significant +97 trip/zone/day demand increase on NYC Uber/Lyft rideshare volume during extreme precipitation events (p < 0.0001)
- Built an automated data pipeline processing 100M+ trip records (Parquet, Polars) merged with NOAA weather observations across 262 NYC taxi zones
- Developed XGBoost/LightGBM demand forecasting models achieving R² = 0.96 with time-series cross-validation and SHAP feature importance analysis
Power Outage Detection via Traffic Patterns 2026
- Investigating whether GPS probe vehicle data can passively detect distribution-level power outages by identifying anomalous driver behavior at traffic signals that have lost power — a novel intersection of energy grid and transportation network data
- Engineered a spatial data pipeline joining 50K+ OSM signalized intersections to NPMRDS road links using R-tree spatial indexing, stored as GeoParquet with automated quality checks
- Designed a causal framework comparing traffic signatures during outage treatment windows against matched control intersections, isolating outage effects from normal congestion
Technical Skills
Geospatial: GeoPandas, PostGIS, GDAL, H3 hexagonal indexing, Census TIGER/Line, WKB geometry serialization, Shapefile processing, EPSG:4269/4326
Data Pipelines: Prefect, Apache Airflow, Apache Spark, dbt, ETL/ELT design, columnar storage (Parquet/zstd), Hive partitioning, schema normalization & versioning
Infrastructure: Docker, Kubernetes, HPC (CHER), RustFS, AWS S3 API, MinIO, Git, SSH
Languages & Tools: Python, Bash, SQL, PyArrow, Boto3, PyYAML, Requests, AWS CLI, uv
Data Systems: Snowflake, PostgreSQL, DuckDB, HERMIT data catalog
Core Concepts: Idempotent pipeline design, compute right-sizing, I/O vs CPU optimization, data quality frameworks
Education
Master of Science, Geoinformatics In Progress
CUNY Hunter College
Advanced Certificate, Geographic Information Systems (GIS) 2022
CUNY Hunter College
Bachelor of Arts, Political Science, Urban Studies & Arabic 2019
Fordham University
Publications & Datasets
- Ciego, R. (2024). Assessing Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure Gaps During Catastrophic Climate Events: A Case Study of Hurricane Ian and Implications for Future Resilience. AGU Fall Meeting 2024, Washington, D.C. Abstract NH51E-2467.
- EAGLE-I Power Outage Data 2025 (EAGLE-I 2025). Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Feb 2026. doi:10.13139/ORNLNCCS/3012826
- EAGLE-I Power Outage Data 2024 (EAGLE-I 2024). Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Apr 2025. doi:10.13139/OLCF/2500278
Languages
English (native) · Arabic (intermediate) · Spanish (intermediate)