SkyWatch is at the forefront of revolutionizing how earth observation data is accessed and utilized globally. Our innovative platform empowers businesses, researchers, and governments to easily integrate satellite data into their operations, driving informed decision-making and unlocking new opportunities for growth and efficiency. Founded on the principle of democratizing access to space-based technology, SkyWatch provides a seamless interface that aggregates data from numerous satellite sources, offering unparalleled access and insights.

Whether monitoring agriculture, managing infrastructure, or advancing scientific research, our scalable solutions cater to diverse industries with a commitment to reliability, security, and sustainability. Whether you are an individual purchasing data for a project, a business seeking to store and share geospatial data, a GIS specialist in need of imagery for maps or workflows, a developer looking to build innovative solutions with our API, or a data provider seeking to sell to our user network, you can do it with SkyWatch. It is our company's shared beliefs, values, and practices.

Please note that SkyWatch may use AI throughout various portions of the talent process. Be the technical leader of the platform every SkyWatch customer and product runs on, and make it the shortest path from what a customer asks for to what they can use. The core platform ingests imagery from dozens of providers, processes and indexes it, and serves it to people and agents through our API, our AI products and our partner storefronts.

You will own how it is built, how rapid it ships and how well it holds up, and you will lead the engineers who build it. You set the architecture and the engineering standards for the commercial platform, and you run its roadmap and delivery against the product direction set by our Chief Product Officer. You meet customers regularly, and what they tell you shapes the roadmap.

That means your calls have to be good for the customer and good for SkyWatch,



and what you ship has to be a pleasure to use. AI runs through all of it. You oversee the design and architecture of our agentic products, and you use AI to make the way we build software faster and leaner.

The best version of this role hears a customer’s problem on Monday, writes the design on Tuesday and ships the fix that week. Stay close to customers. Meet customers regularly, with our product, solutions and revenue teams, and turn what you hear into roadmap priorities.

Measure the time from a customer request to a shipped change and make it the number the team is known for. Hold a very high bar for user experience. Work with product to make them simple, fast and obvious, and don’t ship what falls short.

Set the technical direction for the commercial platform: imagery ingest and processing, data and catalogue, identity and enterprise sign‑in, semantic search, and the agent infrastructure behind our AI products. Oversee the engineering design and architecture of our agentic products: retrieval, tools, evaluation, answer quality and latency, with accuracy measured every release. Run an AI‑native development lifecycle.

Rebuild how we ship around AI: agents that write, review and test code, evals in CI, and a release process fast enough to keep up with them. Turn product direction and customer feedback into a sequenced roadmap, and report delivery against it honestly. Make calls that are good for the customer and for SkyWatch.

Weigh what a feature costs to build and run against what it is worth to customers and to the business, and keep the bigger picture in view when you set priorities. Raise the engineering bar. Design reviews, testing,



observability, reliability targets and incident practice.

Lead and grow the platform and data engineering team: priorities, technical mentorship, hiring and performance, with the support of our People team. Customer‑obsessed. You like being in the room with customers, and you can turn a conversation into a change in production within days.

AI‑native. You have built agents as products, you have rebuilt how you and your team work around AI tools, and you believe in evals over anecdotes. You have designed and run data‑intensive platforms in production, and you know where they break.

A technical leader. You understand what customers pay for and what it costs to serve them, and you make trade‑offs a CEO would recognise. You choose boring technology where it works and new technology where it pays, and you can explain the difference to a non‑engineer. 10+ years building production software, including 3+ years as a staff or principal engineer or technical lead on a platform team. ~ Regular, direct work with customers, and a record of turning what you learned into shipped product quickly. ~ Hands‑on experience shipping LLM, retrieval or agent systems as products, with evaluation in production. ~ Evidence of using AI tools to make a team’s development lifecycle measurably faster. ~ Deep experience with cloud infrastructure, distributed data pipelines and API design. ~ Experience with geospatial data, remote sensing or imagery processing.

Health benefits and flexible hybrid work from the Waterloo Region. Petabyte‑scale imagery, dozens of providers, and AI agents that have to be right about the physical world. Satellite, aerial and drone data and an AI‑native product line, at a company small enough that your decisions show up in production next week.

If you require an accommodation at any stage of the recruitment process, please let us know — we're happy to work with you to ensure your needs are met.

📌 Engineer principal, platform engineering (Waterloo)
🏢 SkyWatch
📍 Waterloo