Principal AI Engineer

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Principal AI Engineer in USA

BlackSky
Full time
Email

USA
10/09/2026
Report

Remote

Responsibilities

Lead full-lifecycle computer vision and machine learning engineering from problem formulation and dataset curation through training, validation, deployment, and error analysis.
Improve model robustness and domain adaptation across satellite sensors, geographic regions, resolutions, viewing conditions, weather, lighting, and seasonal variation.
Ensure models are trained, versioned, deployed, monitored, and maintained reliably in production.
Build and operate geospatial data and computer vision pipelines and AWS-based GPU training and inference workloads.
Optimize production ML systems for inference latency, throughput, memory utilization, GPU efficiency, and cost.
Communicate architecture decisions, experimental results, tradeoffs, risks, and recommendations to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Provide technical leadership and mentorship, lead design reviews and experiment planning, and contribute to proposals and white papers.

Requirements

At least 12 years of hands-on software engineering experience, including at least four years developing computer vision or machine learning solutions for geospatial, remote-sensing, or similarly complex imagery.
Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, mathematics, or a related quantitative field, or equivalent practical experience.
Expert-level Python proficiency and experience developing deep learning systems with PyTorch or comparable ML frameworks.
Experience designing, training, evaluating, and deploying production computer vision models for detection, segmentation, change detection, classification, or time-series analysis.
Strong experience with remote-sensing imagery and geospatial challenges involving spatial resolutions, viewing geometries, sensors, and environmental conditions.
Hands-on experience with geospatial data and computer vision pipelines using Rasterio, GDAL, GeoPandas, Shapely, xarray, Zarr, or similar tools.
Experience taking computer vision capabilities from experimentation through production, including evaluation, deployment, and performance optimization.
Experience developing and operating AWS ML workloads, including GPU-based training and inference.
Ability to provide technical leadership and mentorship without requiring direct management authority.
U.S. citizenship is required for the supported work.
Preferred qualifications include a master’s degree or Ph.D., 15 or more years of relevant experience, experience with multiple commercial and government remote-sensing sources, modern MLOps practices, foundation models, vision-language models, multimodal approaches, self-supervised learning, and significant domain-shift adaptation.
Preferred experience includes rapidly developing prototypes or proof-of-concept applications and communicating results through demonstrations, proposals, white papers, or other technical materials.

Benefits

Medical, dental, vision, disability, group term life, AD&D, voluntary life, and AD&D insurance.
BlackSky pays 100% of employee-only medical, dental, and vision premiums and contributes $100 per month toward out-of-pocket expenses.
15 days of PTO, 11 company holidays, four floating holidays, one day of paid volunteerism leave annually, parental leave, and additional leave programs.
401(k) pre-tax and Roth options with employer match.
Flexible Spending Accounts, Employee Stock Purchase Program, Employee Assistance and Travel Assistance Programs, and employer matching donations.
Professional development, choice of Mac or PC, and company swag.
Preferred location is near Herndon, Virginia, or Seattle, Washington, with strong remote candidates considered; the posting includes a Seattle salary range and is marked remote.

Salary: $185k - $215k/yr

BlackSky

BlackSky builds and operates a constellation of small Earth‑observation satellites and a real‑time geospatial intelligence platform that delivers imagery and automated analytics to government and commercial customers. It sells subscriptions and tasking services for near real‑time monitoring of st...

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