Principal AI Engineer, Machine Learning Operations

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in United States.

📋 Description

• Oversee the complete lifecycle of model engineering, from defining problems and curating datasets to training, validating, deploying, and analyzing errors.

• Enhance model robustness and adapt to various satellite conditions, such as off-nadir angles, low light, seasonal changes, weather disruptions, dense environments, and cross-sensor domain shifts.

• Guarantee that models are trained, versioned, deployed, monitored, and reliably maintained in a production environment.

• Relay technical progress, potential risks, and technology stack details to cross-functional leadership and Product partners.

• Contribute to proposal writing and the creation of white papers.

• Offer technical mentorship, lead design reviews and experiment planning, and promote technical excellence within the engineering team.

• Perform additional job-related tasks as assigned.

• Report directly to the Director of Innovative Solutions.

• Design, scale, deploy, and automate computer vision and machine learning architectures for space-based intelligence and real-time geospatial analytics.

• Optimize edge and cloud computing environments to provide resilient capabilities.

⛳️ Requirements

• A minimum of 12 years of hands-on software engineering experience, with at least four years focused on developing computer vision or machine learning solutions for geospatial, remote sensing, or similarly complex imagery.

• A Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, mathematics, or a related quantitative field, or equivalent practical experience.

• Expert proficiency in Python.

• Proven experience in developing deep learning systems utilizing PyTorch or comparable modern ML frameworks.

• Experience in designing, training, evaluating, and deploying production-grade computer vision models for object detection, segmentation, change detection, image classification, or time-series analysis.

• Strong experience with challenges related to remote sensing imagery and geospatial data.

• Practical experience in constructing geospatial data and CV pipelines using technologies such as Rasterio, GDAL, GeoPandas, Shapely, xarray, Zarr, or similar.

• Capability to transition CV functionalities from experimentation to production, including model evaluation, deployment, and performance optimization.

• Experience in developing and managing ML workloads in AWS, including GPU-based training and inference.

• Excellent technical communication skills for interacting with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Ability to provide technical leadership and mentorship without direct management authority.

• This role requires U.S. citizenship.

• For ITAR compliance: must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident, protected individual, or eligible to obtain necessary U.S. Department of State authorizations.

🏝️ Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision, disability, group term life and AD&D, voluntary life and AD&D insurance.

• BlackSky covers 100% of employee-only premiums for medical, dental, and vision, and contributes $100/month towards out-of-pocket expenses.

• 15 days of paid time off (PTO).

• 11 company holidays.

• Four floating holidays (pro-rated based on hire date).

• One day of paid volunteer leave each year.

• Parental leave.

• 401(k) pre-tax and Roth deferral options with employer matching.

• Flexible Spending Accounts.

• Employee Stock Purchase Program.

• Employee Assistance and Travel Assistance Programs.

• Employer matching donations.

• Opportunities for professional development.

• Choice between Mac or PC.

• Awesome swag.