Principal AI Engineer, Machine Learning Operations

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BlackSky is seeking a Principal AI Engineer, MLOps to lead the design, scaling, and deployment of computer vision and machine learning systems for space-based geospatial intelligence. The role bridges remote sensing research and production software, owning full-lifecycle model engineering from dataset curation through deployment and monitoring. You will provide technical leadership, mentor engineers, and drive model robustness across challenging satellite imagery conditions.

• Lead end-to-end model R&D from problem formulation and dataset curation to training, validation, deployment, and error analysis
• Drive model robustness and domain adaptation across off-nadir angles, low light, seasonal variations, weather, and cross-sensor shifts
• Ensure models are reliably trained, versioned, deployed, monitored, and maintained in production
• Communicate technical progress, risks, and stack to cross-functional leadership and Product partners
• Provide technical mentorship, lead design reviews and experiment planning, and foster engineering excellence

• Minimum 12 years of hands-on software engineering experience, including 4+ years in computer vision or ML for geospatial or complex imagery
• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, mathematics, or related quantitative field, or equivalent experience
• Expert-level Python and deep learning experience with PyTorch or comparable frameworks
• Proven experience deploying production-grade computer vision models for detection, segmentation, change detection, or classification
• Experience with remote sensing imagery and geospatial data challenges
• Hands-on experience with geospatial/CV pipelines using Rasterio, GDAL, GeoPandas, Shapely, xarray, or Zarr
• Experience operating ML workloads in AWS, including GPU-based training and inference
• Strong technical communication and technical leadership/mentorship ability
• US citizenship required

• Master's degree or Ph.D. in computer science, engineering, mathematics, machine learning, or remote sensing
• 15+ years of hands-on software engineering, computer vision, or machine learning experience