Principal AI Engineer, Machine Learning Operations

BlackSky Geospatial Solutions is hiring a Principal AI Engineer to lead machine learning engineering for its satellite imagery and geospatial intelligence platform, from problem definition through dataset preparation, training, validation, and production deployment. The role focuses on improving computer vision model robustness against real-world satellite imagery challenges (lighting, seasonal shifts, sensor variation) and building reliable MLOps pipelines for training, versioning, and monitoring models in operational environments, while mentoring engineers and contributing to technical proposals. Requires 12+ years of software engineering experience including at least 4 years applying computer vision/ML to geospatial or remote sensing data, expert Python and PyTorch, experience deploying production CV models (detection, segmentation, classification), familiarity with geospatial tooling (Rasterio, GDAL, GeoPandas, Shapely, xarray, Zarr), and AWS GPU ML infrastructure experience. U.S. citizenship is required for ITAR compliance. Remote within the USA, with preference for proximity to Herndon, VA or Seattle, WA.