Applied AI/ML Engineer

About the Role

Ursa Space turns complex satellite and spatial data into decision-ready answers. Our agentic GeoAI platform lets users ask a question in plain English about a place, an event, or an activity anywhere on Earth and handles the rest: selecting the right data sources, tasking sensors, running analytics, and delivering an insight report in minutes instead of hours.

We're looking for an Applied AI/ML Engineer to help build the intelligence behind that platform. This is a hybrid role by design. Some weeks you'll be deep in computer vision training and deploying object detection and segmentation models on SAR and electro-optical satellite imagery. Other weeks you'll be building agentic systems: designing tool-calling workflows, orchestrating LLM-driven analysis pipelines, and building the evaluation infrastructure that keeps them reliable. The work varies significantly project to project, and the right candidate sees that as a feature, not a bug.

You'll report to the Director of Analytics and work side-by-side with data scientists, image scientists, product owners, and customers. This role may include pre-scheduled on-call rotations requiring occasional evening or weekend technical support.

This is a virtual role and an exempt position. 

Job Summary

• Design, build, and maintain agentic AI systems that automate stages of the geospatial analysis cycle from natural-language question intake through data selection, multi-source analysis, and report generation
• Develop tool-use, orchestration, and context-management capabilities that connect LLMs to our geospatial data services, analytics, and 90+ integrated data feeds
• Conduct Verification and Validation (V&V) against AI/ML and LLM outputs to ensure accurate resulting information 
• Train, fine-tune, evaluate, and deploy computer vision models (object detection, segmentation, change detection) on SAR, EO, and other Earth Observation data 
• Adapt and fine-tune vision-language models (VLMs) to move beyond bounding boxes toward full scene understanding and extracting the meaningful content of imagery, not just locating objects
• Build evaluation and observability infrastructure for both classical ML (precision/recall, IoU, AUC/ROC) and LLM/agent behavior (task success, groundedness, regression testing), and use it to drive measurable improvement
• Own projects end to end: from data definition and prototyping through production deployment, validation, and maintenance
• Work directly with product owners, internal platform users, and external customers to understand needs, translate requirements into agentic system designs, and explain how the technology works to people who experience it as a black box
• Integrate third-party and multi-source data sets into analysis pipelines
• Do ad-hoc analysis and answer time-sensitive questions from stakeholders across the organization
• Act as a technical resource for teammates to bring awareness of new models, techniques, and tools that help the whole team grow
• Owning measuring actual observed error against budget, not just believing the budget on paper.
• Adversarial and edge-case testing deliberately probing for failure modes (ambiguous imagery, conflicting sources, out-of-distribution inputs) rather than testing the happy path a developer already validated.
• Confidence calibration to ensure that a system's stated confidence actually corresponds to real-world correctness rates, which is its own measurement discipline.
• Experienced with traceability and reproducibility to demonstrate why the system produced a given output, on a specific input, at a specific model/data version.  
• All other duties as assigned. 

Requirements

• B.S. or M.S. in Computer Science, Data Science, or a related STEM field
• 4–6 years of experience building and deploying machine learning systems for product- or software-focused organizations
• Strong Python and production software engineering practices: Git, Docker, testing, code review, CI/CD
• Experience training and deploying deep learning models for computer vision tasks (object detection, image segmentation) using PyTorch or similar frameworks
• Hands-on experience building LLM-powered applications: prompt design, structured outputs, tool use / function calling, and agentic architectures
• Experience evaluating ML systems with appropriate metrics — both traditional (RMSE, FPR/TPR, AUC/ROC, IoU) and LLM/agent evaluation approaches
• Experience developing and deploying in AWS environments
• Strong communication skills: able to present findings and explain complex systems to technical and non-technical audiences, including customers

Preferred Skills

• Prior experience with remote sensing data especially synthetic aperture radar (SAR), GIS, and/or spatial statistics
• Experience fine-tuning foundation models or VLMs (e.g., LoRA/PEFT, multimodal adaptation for domain-specific imagery)
• Familiarity with agent orchestration frameworks and protocols (e.g., LangGraph, Claude Agent SDK, MCP) and LLM observability/eval tooling
• Geospatial Python stack: GDAL, rasterio, geopandas, xarray
• Experience with SQL/NoSQL databases and vector stores
• Experience leading projects on complex, cross-discipline teams
• Familiarity with Confluence, Jira, and Miro
• Regression and drift detection: did a "small" model or prompt change silently degrade accuracy on a case type that isn't in the dev team's day-to-day test set?

Compensation

• Ranges: $185,000 - $199,000.
• Compensation range includes base salary and is eligible for an annual bonus.
• New hires salaries are typically between the range minimum and the salary range midpoint. Actual placement in the range will depend on a candidate’s job-related skills, experience, and expertise, as evaluated during the interview process.

Inclusion Statement

We are dedicated to the belief that all lives have equal value. We strive for a global and cultural workplace that supports ever greater diversity, equity, and inclusion — of voices, ideas, and approaches — and we support this diversity through all our employment practices.

All applicants and employees who are drawn to serve our mission will enjoy equality of opportunity and fair treatment without regard to race, color, age, religion, pregnancy, sex, sexual orientation, disability, gender identity, gender expression, national origin, genetic information, veteran status, marital status, and prior protected activity.

Location

• We are headquartered in Ithaca, NY and have a remote workforce in other locations throughout the United States.

Please note: applications without a relevant cover letter will not be considered. In your cover letter, we would like to hear your personal voice and learn about your sincere interest in Ursa Space Systems.

Benefits and Perks

• Competitive Compensation
• Discretionary PTO & Flexible Scheduling
• Stock Options
• 401(k) Match
• Medical, Dental and Vision Coverage for you and your dependents
• FSA & HSA Plans
• Employer-paid Life Insurance
• Employer-paid LTD and STD for Parental and Family Care
• 11 Paid Holidays
• Employee Resource Groups
• Educational Assistance Program
• Professional Development Opportunities
• And more…

Company Values

• Use the team
• Figure it out and own it
• Aim for elegant simplicity
• Empower diversity & inclusivity
• Do the right thing
• Be scrappy