Team Lead, Machine Learning and Image Processing

SkyWatch

Waterloo, Ontario

1d ago

At SkyWatch, we believe that everyone on the planet should benefit from the thousands of satellites that orbit the earth.

We are building a platform to put the world’s Earth observation data in one place a simple API any developer can use. Our team of extraordinarily talented people has built a cutting-edge microservices platform on a serverless stack, and we’re growing fast.

OUR TEAM

Let’s face it, the best jobs boil down to a handful of things getting the chance to work with amazing people in a great culture with leaders who have your back while pursuing a vision that you can get passionate about.

Our team consists of NASA award-winning developers, Earth observation scientists, big data specialists, and unicorn startup veterans from places like Facebook, IBM, and Berkeley and who come from five of the seven continents.

Our leadership team includes the Chair of Canada’s first Space Accelerator for startups, an Earth observation veteran who has led multiple companies through IPOs, a planetary robotics graduate from the International Space University, and a petabyte-scale data leader with patents in location AI and contextual analytics.

We are Techstars 16 NYC and Google for Entrepreneurs alumni. We have a unique blend of space / satellite authorities and consumer application veterans.

And we are just getting started!

OUR CULTURE

Culture is the personality of a company. At SkyWatch, our culture is incredibly important to us, and we practice it every day.

As a company, we value innovation, dependability, and accessibility. In our product, we value simplicity, affordability, and informability.

In engineering, we specifically value our team’s happiness over unrealistic product planning (People First), flexibility over a rigorous top-down process (Freedom & Autonomy), and improving our overall system over dwelling on unintended mistakes or bugs (Just Culture).

Our mission and values are on the walls of our office. We don’t just talk the talk, we walk the walk.

OUR PRODUCT

Every day, hundreds of trillions of pixels of our planet are captured from space. With new applications for this data such as precision farming, construction planning, disaster relief operations, and retail revenue prediction (to name a few), the demand for satellite imagery is growing.

However, the current process for obtaining satellite imagery is very time-consuming and tedious.

While the number of sensors observing our planet is growing exponentially, we are seeing each of these instruments creating their own unique dataset.

Getting access to many of these catalogs is expensive and time-consuming. And once access is achieved, is it difficult to integrate data from multiple sources into one system.

And we all know the most impactful analytics happen when large volumes of data are normalized and can be easily incorporated into powerful models.

Using our team's experience in building NASA-award-winning software, we are building the SkyWatch API, a simple way to discover and access the world’s remote sensing data.

We are making it easy for organizations and developers to monitor the progress of crops, predict the markets, track ships and airplanes, measure global warming, or create other game-changing applications.

We do the data work behind the scenes so developers are free to build the apps that change the world. Sound exciting? You’re right it is.

About the role and where do you fit? Great question!

ABOUT YOU

You enjoy being a player and a coach who is positive, supportive, trusting, and focused. You love helping people reach their potential.

You have the ability to solve problems, not just complete tasks. You are an artist and a craftsperson, not an assembly line worker.

You empathize with those who use what you’ve built. You want to solve their problems.

You have strong technical chops, but can also describe technical things to non-technical people. You can tell a ten-year-old how an API works and not have them glaze over with boredom.

Or a CEO. Or your significant other. OK, maybe not your significant other.

You have a diverse background. Volunteer as a Big Sister? Founded a Meetup? Love to paint? Play a sport? We love diversity and value how much it adds to our team.

You have a thirst for learning. We learn something every day. We find it intoxicating. If you’d rather master one thing and do that every day, this probably isn’t the role for you.

You have thoughtful opinions that you feel comfortable sharing. We have a culture that makes sharing opinions safe. If everyone in a meeting always thinks the same way, we have too many people in that meeting.

You have the ability to give more than you take. We have an incredible team. We want you to make it even better.

YOUR LEADERSHIP ARSENAL

You are empathetic and believe in servant leadership.

You have a strong background in software development best practices and embrace a culture that values an extensive test strategy.

You have the ability to maximize resources and inspire. You see things as they are with a firm grasp on reality.

You have vision and can see a future version of things where they are better.

You’ve love building software and want to continue building applications with a hands-on approach.

YOUR TECHNICAL ARSENAL

You can bounce between Python and Java and love building high performing reliable, high performing applications (bonus points for familiarity with distributed systems)

You have experience with a broad range of geospatial and remote sensing technologies (such as GDAL or SNAP) and know how to create a normalized difference vegetation index.

You believe in pragmatic ML and AI, and realize the model isn’t the product, but a way to make the product better.

You can explain how a CNN works to a high school student.

You love math and can articulate the difference between supervised and unsupervised machine learning in your own words.

You understand the importance of code reviews and writing clean, maintainable code

You believe in automated testing and can explain why it’s so important

You’ve built software of some kind to solve a problem in your life outside of work.

You have extensive experience on AWS, and get excited about their new product announcements.

You’ve used git at the command line and have felt the pain of merge conflicts.

You’ve secured an application and can articulate the value of differing security levels.

YOUR TYPICAL DAY

9 : 00 am you sign on, catch up on Slack, email, system status, and important metrics.

10 : 00 am you participate in our daily stand up, sharing what you did yesterday, what you plan on doing today, and if there are any roadblocks.

10 : 15 am you pair-program with one of your teammates helping them push through a complex requirement.

12 : 00 pm you get some fresh air or connect virtually with teammates for some social time.

1 : 00 pm you put on the headphones and get dialed in to build a new microservice.

3 : 30 pm happy with the code, you deploy to dev, and if tests pass, staging.

4 : 00 pm you work together with other developers to lead a design session for a new feature, gathering thoughts, opinions, and lending your experience to the discussion.

5 : 00 pm you wrap up unit tests, prep for deployment tomorrow, and disconnect for the day.

A FEW MORE THINGS TO KNOW

We offer a solid compensation package including a competitive salary, stock options, and a comprehensive benefits plan for you, and your family.

We have flexible work hours and flexible remote working options.

In normal times, our HQ is in Uptown Waterloo, at the Communitech Data Hub, where we are surrounded by other awesome startups focused on data, AI, machine learning, and IOT.

If you think you would fit this role then please go to https : / / www.skywatch.com / careers.

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