Staff SW Engineer, Machine Learning Operations

Staff SW Engineer, Machine Learning Operations

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.

BlackSky is looking for a talented and creative Staff Software Engineer to support the development, operation, and capability evolution of BlackSky’s cutting-edge AI/ML Platform. As part of the BlackSky Labs team, you are instrumental in supporting the development of novel ML applications at BlackSky. You will help ensure that we deliver consistent, reliable, and relevant ML products to BlackSky’s growing user base. Your primary responsibilities will be the integration, testing, maintenance, and deployment of ML/AI products into BlackSky environments.

This position is a critical element of the BlackSky AI/ML Engineering team and is expected to work collaboratively with internal satellite development teams to ensure success. The ideal candidate has geospatial software engineering, computer vision model deployment, operations, and testing experience; familiarity with satellite imagery or similar datasets; and success working in an agile development environment. Additionally, the ideal candidate has demonstrated the ability to manage their own efforts over a broad scope of work as an independent contributor. Finally, the candidate should be an independent thinker with the demonstrated ability and willingness to lean in to learn new tools, technologies, and approaches to solve new problems. This role reports to the Manager of the BlackSky labs team and while we would prefer this position to be local to our Herndon, VA office, we are open to candidates in certain remote states.

Responsibilities:

• Deployment and integration of computer vision solutions for next-generation satellite imagery analytics.
• Ensure high-quality and production-ready Python or Go code.
• Manage cloud infrastructure and code deployment to AWS, Kubernetes, or other environments.
• Take part in the entire project lifecycle from requirements development to deployment.
• Serve as a lead on MLOps software development projects, data ETL projects, and software feature development.
• Collaborate with management and technical team on technical roadmap and implementation strategy.
• Other job-related duties as assigned.

Required Qualifications:

• Minimum of eight years of hands-on experience as a software engineer with at least three years focused on geospatial MLOps.
• Bachelor’s Degree or higher in one of the following fields: computer science, mathematics, physics, statistics, or another computational field or equivalent experience.
• Demonstrated experience designing and building scalable production software solutions and architectures, especially for machine learning or image processing.
• Strong Python3 proficiency or GO proficiency and experience writing production software for data ETL, REST APIs, micro-services, geospatial, or data analytics, and cloud deployment.
• Experience with databases, SQL queries, and data model design especially SQL su