Principal Platform Engineer

Company Description:

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.

Our Products:

Our suite of applications is tailored to meet the diverse needs of users on the SkyWatch platform. 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.

Our Culture:

Culture is the personality of a company. It is our company's shared beliefs, values, and practices. At SkyWatch, our culture is incredibly important to us, and we practice it every day. Both as a company and in our products, we value simplicity, dependability, and empathy. 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.

Please note that SkyWatch may use AI throughout various portions of the talent process.

The mission

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 fast it ships and how well it holds up, and you will lead the engineers who build it.

The role

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. You are hands-on: you design the hard parts, review the important changes and unblock the team.

Reporting to the CEO, you have real say over what gets built and how. 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.

We want a principal who still builds. The best version of this role hears a customer’s problem on Monday, writes the design on Tuesday and ships the fix that week.

Key responsibilities

• Stay close to customers. Meet customers regularly, with our product, solutions and revenue teams, and turn what you hear into roadmap priorities.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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. Standards that hold up at speed.

• 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.

Who you are

• Customer-obsessed. You like being in the room with customers, and you can turn a conversation into a change in production within days.

• 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.

• 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.

• A builder at scale. You have designed and run data-intensive platforms in production, and you know where they break.

• A technical leader. Engineers seek out your reviews, and you have led a team through a roadmap rather than only contributed to one.

• 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.

• Pragmatic. You choose boring technology where it works and new technology where it pays, and you can explain the difference to a non-engineer.

Qualifications

• 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

Compensation

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.

Why SkyWatch

• Ownership. The platform is yours to shape, with a direct line to the CEO.

• Hard problems. Petabyte-scale imagery, dozens of providers, and AI agents that have to be right about the physical world.

• 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.

Accessibility at SkyWatch

At SkyWatch, we believe every candidate deserves a fair and inclusive experience. 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.

To request an accommodation, please advise any member of the talent team or contact us at accessibility@skywatch.com.