Staff Machine Learning Quality Engineer

Staff Engineer, Machine Learning Quality

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 Machine Learning Quality Engineer to support the development, operation, and capability evolution of Spectra AI, BlackSky’s cutting edge AI/ML Platform. As part of the machine learning team, you are instrumental in shaping our computer vision products by managing the quality of data that trains AI/ML models.  You will help manage and grow the entire labeling process that trains Spectra AI, overseeing remote data labeling teams and actively assess the quality of trained models, which create critical timely insights for our customers.

While the locations listed in the job posting are ideal, we would love candidates near either our Herndon, VA or Seattle, WA offices. We may also consider remote candidates in certain states.

Responsibilities:

• Own and architect vision, strategy, and technical roadmap for BlackSky’s data labeling pipeline.
• Lead and manage data labeling teams, providing oversight for labeling campaigns.
• Act as a key technical leader, partnering with stakeholders across the broader team (e.g., computer vision, mlops, platform) to meet customer-driven timelines and product requirements.
• Research for AI product development, identifying geographic areas where objects exist, developing object ontologies, building annotation instructions, and identifying imagery for annotation.
• Collaborate with machine learning and product teams to define metrics, assess, and report on the quality of machine learning models in development and production using statistical and quality assurance approaches.
• Create processes, tools, and scripts to manage and track data quality and labeling performance.
• Take part in the entire project lifecycle from requirements development to deployment.
• Mentor and guide other engineers on the team, leveraging your experience to teach others and foster a culture of technical excellence and innovation.
• Other job-related duties as assigned.

Required Qualifications:

• Minimum of eight (8) years of hands-on experience as a data quality engineer, imagery analyst, GIS analyst, or quality assurance engineer in the space of satellites, computer vision, or machine learning.
• Bachelor’s Degree or higher in one of the following fields: computer science, GIS, data science, mathematics, physics, statistics, or another scientific field, or equivalent experience (four years).
• Experience interpreting satellite imagery to identify objects, behaviors, or activities and working with GIS datasets.
• Hands on experience with annotation platforms such as LabelBox, SuperAnnotate, AWS Sagemaker, or CVAT and managing remote annotation workforces.
• Able to interdependently manage work projects defining, managing, and executing based on fixed objectives.
• Collaborates well with others and able to communicate ideas to those with other backgrounds.
• Experience with quality assurance practices, model testing & evaluation, and computing metrics & statistics from data.
• Attention to detail and ability to define, enforce, and follow rigorous process controls for managing data.
• Experience working with or managing Data Labeling teams such as CloudFactory, Hive, or iMerit.
• The program this role will support requires Us-born citizenship.

Preferred Qualifications:

• Over ten (10) years of relevant professional experience.
• Experience with AI advancements in image annotation such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM), Embeddings, and other AI Assistance tools.
• Experience writing code and scripts, especially for processing large amounts of data.
• Proficiency with Python for automation and data manipulation tasks.
• Knowledge and experience working in an AWS Cloud environment.
• Demonstrated ability to lead and manage small teams.