Staff SW Engineer, Machine Learning

Staff SW Engineer, Machine Learning

About Us:

BlackSky is a real-time intelligence company. We own and operate the world's most advanced space-based intelligence platform and provide customers satellite imagery, automated analytics and high-frequency monitoring of strategic locations, economic assets and events from around the globe. BlackSky is trusted by the most demanding allied military and intelligence organizations and commercial companies to deliver foresight into critical matters that affect national security and the economy. BlackSky's data enables governments and businesses to see, understand and anticipate change as it happens, giving them the ultimate strategic advantage so they can act quickly. Our global team works with cutting-edge technology to make a difference around the world and prides itself on being people-first, customer-focused and fun.

This is a remote role with a focus on integrating machine learning into automated, remotely deployed, machine learning systems. The job requires the ability to understand a variety of challenging ML tasks in the GIS computer vision, time series, and natural language domains. In addition, you will help develop model pre-training and fine-tuning approaches for configurable ML training pipelines. While the primary focus is on computer vision, some work with LLM and VLM may be required. You will work closely with the BlackSky analytics team to port existing analytics into a remote ML environment and report to the Director, BlackSky Labs.

Responsibilities:

• Design and implement solutions for internal and external customers that exploit traditional machine learning and novel deep learning for next-generation satellite imagery analytics.
• Plan and conduct research projects related to computer vision, time series analysis, content curation, probabilistic modeling, machine learning, predictive analytics, and geometric modeling.
• Develop algorithms, models, and analytical tools for solving domain specific business problems.
• Implement production quality analytics and models into the SpectraAI codebase (Python).
• Collaborate with management and technical team on product strategy.
• Collaborate with infrastructure developers and machine learning quality engineers to build robust analytics for production use cases.
• Independently design and conduct experiments, tests hypothesis, implement model and loss function code, train models, and interpret experiment results following a machine learning process based on high level project objectives.
• Other job-related duties as assigned.

Required Qualifications:

• At least eight years of hands-on experience as a machine learning engineer or data scientist.
• Bachelor Degree or higher in one of the following fields: computer science, mathematics, physics, statistics, or another computational field with a strong background of using machine learning/data mining for predictive modeling or time series analysis.
• Extensive experience developing machine learning based software solutions. In particular, developing models in Python 3, PyTorch, Tensorflow, Keras, or scikit-learn.
• Working knowledge of a wide range of machine learning concepts including supervised and unsupervised deep learning methods for both classification and regression.
• Experience performing research in both groups and as a solo effort with a history of implementing algorithms directly from research papers.
• Experience conducting literature review and applying concepts to programs or products.
• Strong ability to communicate concepts and analytical results with customers, management, and the technical team, highlighting actionable insights.
• Hands-on experience working with la