Staff Engineer, AI

BlackSky • Herndon, VA

1d • Onsite

About The Position

BlackSky is seeking a Staff AI Engineer to lead the architecture, development, and delivery of mission-critical AI solutions within customer environments. This is a hands-on role and an opportunity to develop and shape an exciting new growth area. The ideal candidate for this role blends deep technical ownership (roadmap, R&D, AI/ML systems) with customer-facing solution delivery (scoping, prototype-to-production, and executive communication). This senior individual contributor role will partner with CV, MLOps, Data QA, Solutions, and BD teams to ensure BlackSky delivers reliable and actionable insights. The role will be full-time based out of Herndon, VA working in our SCIF with occasional customer site commitments and will report to the Senior Manager of AI.

Requirements

• Minimum of 10 years of hands-on software engineering experience, including at least 4+ years developing and deploying applied AI/ML systems and pipelines.
• Bachelor’s degree in CS/EE/math/statistics or a related quantitative field.
• Strong proficiency in Python and modern ML/CV libraries such as PyTorch or TensorFlow.
• Experience researching, building, and evaluating production-ready CV models for detection, segmentation, change detection, or related tasks.
• Experience working with remote sensing imagery including geometry, radiometric normalization, augmentation, and sensor-specific challenges.
• Hands-on experience with geospatial tools such as GDAL, Rasterio, GeoPandas, Shapely, xarray, or Zarr.
• Experience with modern ML infrastructure, including cloud services (e.g., AWS), containerization and orchestration platforms (e.g., Kubernetes), and the ability to adapt these systems to customer-specific or offline environments such as secure enclaves, on-prem systems, or air-gapped deployments.
• Strong ability to communicate complex technical concepts to diverse audiences including leadership and technical teams.
• Must have an active US Top Secret clearance with an SCI.

Nice To Haves

• M.S. or Ph.D. in CS/EE/math/statistics or a related quantitative field.
• At least 2 years of experience designing, building, and operating AI/ML systems in secure, on-prem and/or air-gapped systems.
• Experience working in DoD, IC, or Fed/Civ environments.
• Experience designing and executing large-scale CV experiments, including dataset construction, synthetic/augmented data generation, and evaluation protocols tailored to mission needs.
• Familiarity with remote sensing data sources including BlackSky, Airbus, Planet, and Vantor.
• Demonstrated experience designing CV/ML systems and pipelines that meet or exceed benchmarks and are optimized for production constraints such as latency and efficiency.
• Exposure to foundation models, VLMs, and other multimodal approaches for geospatial imagery.

Responsibilities

• Partner with CV and MLOps to design and extend components needed to ensure models are trained, versioned, deployed, monitored, and maintained reliably in customer environments.
• Collaborate with the Data QA team to define annotation standards, resolve taxonomy issues, and identify data-quality improvements based on model failure modes.
• Independently prototype, evaluate, and deploy AI capabilities in a secure development environment.
• Communicate technical strategy, progress, risks, and opportunities clearly to leadership, cross-functional partners, and other stakeholders.
• Contribute to proposals, white papers, and long-term strategy, shaping future mission-aligned geospatial AI investments.
• Own and architect the mission-aligned roadmap for geospatial CV and applied AI, partnering with customers to translate mission requirements into technical designs and implementing core components.
• 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: Senior