Lead, Image Data & Software

Lead, Image Data & Software Engineering

Clearance Requirement: None, but US Personhood is required

About Us:

BlackSky is a geospatial intelligence solutions provider that enables organizations to task, collect, and transform data from earth observation, global sensor networks, mobile devices, and social media to deliver on-demand insights about places, events, and assets that are critical to their operations. Blacksky provides satellite collection, data, and cloud based -processing and analytic solutions to organizations that are capitalizing on the exponential growth of a wide range of sensor and collection platforms for delivering the next generation of GEOINT and location intelligence solutions. BlackSky has extensive expertise and capabilities in commercial remote sensing, multi-source analytics, cloud computing, open source software development, Amazon Web Services, and big data geospatial analytics. BlackSky provides solutions to commercial and government organizations with relevant programs with the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA), US. Army, and U.S. Air Force Research Labs.

The Image Data & Software group works together with the Image Processing group and Electro-Optical Payloads group to build and sustain BlackSky’s image processing pipeline. As the Lead for the Image Data & Software Engineering group you report to the Director of Imaging and will be responsible for leading the team who develops and maintains the pipeline that transforms the raw pixels collected by BlackSky’s satellites into imagery products.

Your leadership will have a direct impact on the quality, timeliness, and utility of one of BlackSky’s core products. You will leverage your extensive technical and interpersonal abilities in a fast-paced, multi-disciplinary, and highly-collaborative environment to ensure that BlackSky’s image processing pipeline is at the cutting-edge of low-latency, cloud computing and machine vision.

(Role can be located anywhere in the US with a minor preference for being within driving distance of one of our hubs in Seattle, Herndon, Denver, or Albuquerque)

Responsibilities:

• Write, deploy, and maintain the production image processing pipeline that transforms raw data from the satellites into imagery products and calibration coefficients
• Build and mentor a team of talented, collaborative, and motivated image data & software engineers with high expectations for individual ownership and impact
• Collaborate with the other Imaging, Analytics, and Software tech leads to define the technology strategy and architectural vision for BlackSky’s image processing pipeline
• Provide data access and visualization for data scientists, analysts, and executives to inform decision-making and technology strategy
• Mentor engineers and scientists on best practices and performance; identify gaps in requirements or implementation processes and advocate for continuous improvement
• Collaborate with image processing engineers to deploy new algorithms into the production pipeline, develop robust tools for at-scale testing

Required Qualifications:

• Excellent written and verbal communication skills and an ability to articulate technical concepts clearly and succinctly
• Expertise in Python
• Expertise in agile development methodologies, git, CI/CD
• Proficiency with cloud deployments and environments, particularly AWS
• Experience building a production-level, processing pipeline
• Experience building and leading teams to collaboratively solve complex, multi-disciplinary problems
• Experience with data engineering, ETL, data viz
• Experience with Docker/Containerized applications

Preferred Qualifications:

• Experience with large-scale scientific computing
• DevOps/MLOps experience
• Experience with key data science, image processing, and geospatial libraries, such as NumPy, Pandas, OpenCV, GDAL, etc
• Big Data experience (Hadoop, spark, kafka, etc)
• Proficiency with C++, C, and Cython (in addition to Python)
• Experience with config management/orchestration tools (chef, ansible, terraform, cloudformation)

BlackSky is committed to hiring and retaining a diverse workforce. We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action Employer All Qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, age, national origin, sexual orientation, gender identity, disability, protected veteran status or any other characteristic protected by law.

To conform to U.S. Government space technology export regulations, including the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) you must be a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident of the U.S., protected individual as defined by 8 U.S.C. 1324b(a)(3), or eligible to obtain the required authorizations from the U.S. Department of State.

EEO/AAP/ Pay Transparency Statements: https://www.dol.gov/ofccp/regs/compliance/posters/pdf/eeopost.pdfhttps://www.dol.gov/ofccp/regs/compliance/posters/pdf/OFCCP_EEO_Supplement_Final_JRF_QA_508c.pdf