Kshitij Raj Sharma is a Senior AI Engineer at the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team, where he works on AI for Earth observation and the tools that make it usable by local mapping communities. He came to geospatial from a software background: computer science in school, then an engineering degree in geomatics at the Institute of Engineering, Tribhuvan University, in Nepal, and a master's in geodata science and AI for Earth observation through the Copernicus Master in Digital Earth (University of Salzburg, Austria and University of South Brittany, France). His thesis introduced VHR-Bench, which tests twelve geospatial foundation models across ten datasets at very high resolution, several of them drawn from humanitarian mapping, and he also contributed to developing a geospatial foundation model native to that resolution.

Born and raised in rural western Nepal, he learned the field side as an engineer: GNSS and DGPS surveying, drone flying, and photogrammetry. He started volunteering in OpenStreetMap in 2016 and mapped his own rural municipality. With GESAN, a YouthMappers chapter in Nepal, he took the proposal to his Rural Municipality, added Nepali-language presets to a field surveying application so local collectors could use it, and delivered a mapbook the municipality used for planning.

Five years of volunteering brought him to HOT in 2021 as a backend engineer, where he led development of raw-data-api and the HOT Export Tool, which publish OpenStreetMap extracts to the Humanitarian Data Exchange and became HOT's map data access services, moving exports to cloud-native formats, streamlining the process. He was Product Owner for those services before moving fully into AI, and is now a core engineer and maintainer of fAIr, HOT's open AI-assisted mapping service, and of fAIr-models, the STAC catalog of Earth observation models behind it, used in HOT's disaster responses including the Venezuela earthquake and the Nepal floods.

Outside HOT he writes open-source tools for large Earth observation and OpenStreetMap datasets, such as VirtuGhan,oex, OSMSG: which lets communities count their own edits and many more. He is a founding member of open source developer community called OSGeo Nepal, speaks regularly at FOSS4G and State of the Map, and mentors new contributors through Outreachy & community projects.

Away from work, he plays basketball and FIFA, hikes and travels, keeps cats and dogs, and occasionally writes poems.