Principal AI Engineer, Machine Learning Operations

BlackSky

3h • $185,000 - $215,000 • Remote

About The Position

BlackSky is a real-time intelligence company that owns and operates a space-based intelligence platform, providing satellite imagery, automated analytics, and high-frequency monitoring. The company is seeking a Principal AI Engineer, MLOps to pioneer the next generation of space-based intelligence and real-time geospatial analytics. This role involves designing, scaling, deploying, and automating computer vision (CV) and machine learning (ML) architectures, bridging the gap between research and production software, and extracting actionable intelligence from satellite imagery. The position offers the opportunity to optimize edge and cloud compute environments and deliver resilient capabilities. While candidates near Herndon, VA or Seattle, WA are preferred, strong remote candidates will be considered.

Requirements

• Minimum of 12 years of hands-on software engineering experience, including at least four years developing computer vision or machine learning solutions for geospatial, remote sensing, or similarly complex imagery.
• Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, mathematics, or a related quantitative field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Expert-level proficiency in Python and demonstrated experience developing deep learning systems using PyTorch or comparable modern ML frameworks.
• Proven experience designing, training, evaluating, and deploying production-grade computer vision models for tasks such as object detection, segmentation, change detection, image classification, or time-series analysis.
• Strong experience working with remote sensing imagery and the unique challenges associated with geospatial data, including varying spatial resolutions, viewing geometries, sensors, and environmental conditions.
• Hands-on experience building geospatial data and CV pipelines using tools such as Rasterio, GDAL, GeoPandas, Shapely, xarray, Zarr, or similar technologies.
• Demonstrated experience taking CV capabilities from experimentation through production, including model evaluation, deployment, and performance optimization.
• Experience developing and operating ML workloads in AWS, including GPU-based training and inference.
• Strong technical communication skills with the ability to communicate architecture decisions, experimental results, tradeoffs, risks, and recommendations to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Demonstrated ability to provide technical leadership and mentorship across engineering teams without requiring direct management authority.
• The work this role supports requires holding US citizenship.

Nice To Haves

• Master’s degree or Ph.D. in computer science, engineering, mathematics, machine learning, remote sensing, or a related quantitative field.
• At least 15 years of hands-on software engineering, computer vision, or machine learning experience.
• Experience working with imagery from multiple commercial and government remote sensing sources, such as BlackSky, Sentinel, Airbus, Planet, or WorldView.
• Demonstrated experience optimizing ML systems for production constraints, including inference latency, throughput, memory utilization, GPU efficiency, and cost.
• Experience rapidly developing prototypes or proof-of-concept applications and communicating results through customer demonstrations, proposals, white papers, or other technical materials.
• Strong experience with modern MLOps practices, including experiment tracking, dataset and model versioning, reproducibility, automated evaluation, and production monitoring.
• Experience applying foundation models, vision-language models (VLMs), multimodal approaches, or self-supervised learning to geospatial or remote sensing problems.
• Experience adapting models across sensors, geographic regions, resolutions, collection conditions, or other significant domain shifts.

Responsibilities

• Leading full-lifecycle model engineering from initial problem formulation and dataset curation to training, validation, deployment, and error analysis.
• Driving model resilience against challenging real-world satellite conditions, including off-nadir angles, low light, seasonal variations, weather distortions, dense environments, and cross-sensor domain shifts.
• Ensuring models are reliably trained, versioned, deployed, monitored, and maintained in production.
• Communicating technical progress, risks, and stack to cross-functional leadership and Product partners while contributing to proposals and white papers.
• Providing technical mentorship, spearheading design reviews and experiment planning, and fostering a culture of technical excellence across the engineering team.
• Other job-related duties as assigned.

Benefits

• Medical, dental, vision, disability, group term life and AD&D, voluntary life and AD&D insurance
• BlackSky pays 100% of employee-only premiums for medical, dental and vision and contributes $100/month for out-of-pocket expenses!
• 15 days of PTO, 11 Company holidays, four Floating Holidays (pro-rated based on hire date), one day of paid volunteerism leave per year, parental leave and more
• 401(k) pre-tax and Roth deferral options with employer match
• Flexible Spending Accounts
• Employee Stock Purchase Program
• Employee Assistance and Travel Assistance Programs
• Employer matching donations
• Professional development
• Mac or PC? Your choice!
• Awesome swag

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Principal