Staff Engineer, Machine Learning Quality

Staff Machine Learning Quality Engineer

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.

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 by managing the quality of data that trains AI/ML models.  You will help manage 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. This position reports to the Manager, Machine Learning Quality and we would love candidates near either our Herndon, VA or Seattle, WA offices. We may also consider remote candidates in certain states.

Responsibilities:

• Lead and manage tasking for the data labeling teams, correcting work and ensuring consistent quality output for data to train machine learning models.
• Research use cases for computer vision machine learning models identifying areas of interest where objects exist, develop object ontologies, build annotation instructions, and identifies imagery for annotation.
• Asses and report on the quality of machine learning models in development as well as production using statistical and quality assurance approaches.
• Create processes, tools, & scripts to manage and track data quality and performance.
• Work with the machine learning and product teams to define and measure the performance of machine learning models against SLAs.
• Learn customer requirements and map those to machine learning and computer vision tasks.
• Take part in the entire project lifecycle from requirements development to deployment.
• Collaborate with management and technical team on product and platform strategy.
• Other job-related duties as assigned.

Required Qualifications: 

• Minimum of 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.
• 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 interpedently 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 and/or testing.
• Attention to detail and ability to define, enforce, and follow rigorous process controls for managing data.
• Experience analyzing data to compute metrics and statistics.
• While a clearance is not required, this position does require eligibility to obtain a clearance which requires U.S. citizenship.

Preferred Qualifications: 

• Experience working with or managing Data Labeling teams such as CloudFactory, Hive, or Mechanical Turk.
• Experience with AI advancements in image annotation such as the Segment Anything Model (SAM), Embeddings, and other AI Assistance tools.
• Proficiency in python3 for automation and data manipulation tasks.
• Knowledge and experience working in an AWS Cloud environment.

Life at BlackSky for full-time benefits-eligible employees includes:

• Medical, dental, vision, disability,