SkyWatch - Principal Platform Engineer

Kitchener, Ontario, Canada - Hybrid$195k - $195k+ Equity3w ago

In Office Principal NA Cloud Computing Artificial Intelligence Platform Engineer Principal Reporting Close

Requirements

• Customer-obsessed. You like being in the room with customers, and you can turn a conversation into a change in production within days. • Customer-obsessed. • Great taste. You care how a product feels, not just whether it works. You can show us things you built that users love, and you notice when something is almost right. • Great taste. • 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. • AI-native. • A builder at scale. You have designed and run data-intensive platforms in production, and you know where they break. • A builder at scale. • A technical leader. Engineers seek out your reviews, and you have led a team through a roadmap rather than only contributed to one. • A technical leader. • Commercially minded. You understand what customers pay for and what it costs to serve them, and you make trade-offs a CEO would recognise. It needn’t be your strongest suit, but you want to grow it. • Commercially minded. • Pragmatic. You choose boring technology where it works and new technology where it pays, and you can explain the difference to a non-engineer. • Pragmatic. • 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. • Products, APIs or developer experiences you shaped that set a high bar for usability, and that you can walk us through. • 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. • Experience making build decisions with a business trade-off, such as cost to serve, pricing or time to market. • Deep experience with cloud infrastructure, distributed data pipelines and API design. • Experience with geospatial data, remote sensing or imagery processing. Strongly preferred • Experience with enterprise identity, multi-tenant SaaS or marketplace platforms. Preferred

Responsibilities

• Stay close to customers. Meet customers regularly, with our product, solutions and revenue teams, and turn what you hear into roadmap priorities. • Stay close to customers. • Shorten the path from feedback to production. Measure the time from a customer request to a shipped change and make it the number the team is known for. • Shorten the path from feedback to production. • Hold a very high bar for user experience. Own how the platform feels to the people who use it: our API and developer experience, the answers our agents give, and the workflows in our products. Work with product to make them simple, fast and obvious, and don’t ship what falls short. • Hold a very high bar for user experience. • Own the architecture. 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. • Own the architecture. • Set the bar for our agentic products. Oversee the engineering design and architecture of our agentic products: retrieval, tools, evaluation, answer quality and latency, with accuracy measured every release. • Set the bar for our agentic products. • 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. • Run an AI-native development lifecycle. • 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. • Make calls that are good for the customer and for SkyWatch. • Raise the engineering bar. Design reviews, testing, observability, reliability targets and incident practice. Standards that hold up at speed. • Raise the engineering bar. • Lead the team. Lead and grow the platform and data engineering team: priorities, technical mentorship, hiring and performance, with the support of our People team. • Lead the team.

Benefits

• Base salary plus stock options. Health benefits and flexible hybrid work from the Waterloo Region. Indicative base salary: CA$195,000 to CA$235,000, depending on experience. • Indicative base salary: CA$195,000 to CA$235,000 • Ownership. The platform is yours to shape, with a direct line to the CEO. • Ownership. • Hard problems. Petabyte-scale imagery, dozens of providers, and AI agents that have to be right about the physical world. • Hard problems. • The frontier. 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. • The frontier. • Accessibility at SkyWatch