Staff Engineer, AI

Stack

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

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
• ▹Must have an active US Top Secret clearance with an SCI

Nice to have

• ▹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 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

Soft skills

What we offer

• ▹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, one paid volunteer day 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
• ▹Choice of Mac or PC

About the company

BlackSky is a real-time intelligence company that owns and operates one of the world's most advanced space-based intelligence platforms, providing satellite imagery, automated analytics, and high-frequency monitoring of strategic locations, economic assets, and events around the globe to military, intelligence, and commercial customers.