company

Sr. Computer Vision Scientist

Engineering

Full-time

Description

Our mission at Orbital Insight is to use geospatial data to understand what is happening on and to the Earth. A major part of that vision is using computer vision to look at petabytes of satellite and drone imagery -- indeed one of the founding insights of the company was that the availability of imagery is rapidly outstripping the number of humans available to look at it. Hidden within that imagery at scale are the answers to myriad questions ranging from development rates in countries around the world, to agricultural productivity, to deployments of ground and air military assets, to mass migration and immigration, to climate change, to the state of economic cycles in countries around the world. We are leading the charge to use AI and Data Science at scale to make sense of this data and inform decision makers around the world.

In order to answer these questions we must break new ground in Computer Vision: leveraging existing open source libraries and moving beyond the state of the art in object detection and semantic segmentation -- understanding what is possible in the unique domain of Computer Vision for satellite and drone imagery. Using convolutional neural networks, we have counted over 3 billion cars across global roads and parking lots, analyzing commercial patterns as well as city growth and development. We have recently expanded our capabilities to include detecting trucks, identifying hundreds of classes of airplanes, different types of armoured vehicles, and changes in land use. Other projects include site monitoring near facilities or bases, tracking rates of deforestation, measuring poverty levels around the globe, monitoring construction rates of new roads and buildings, and ground-breaking work in areas such as using simulated imagery to augment human-labeled training imagery of rare or important objects and land types. This is still just the beginning of our mission to understand the Earth.

In order to support the continued growth of the business we are looking to hire a Computer Vision Scientist to join our team. This Computer Vision Scientist will work on core research projects that advance the state of the art in object detection, classification, and semantic segmentation capabilities for satellite and aerial imagery. This role will involve developing CV models and new architectures on new data sources, improving existing CV models to reach higher and higher performance metrics, and collaborating with other Engineers to deploy these models in multiple cloud environments. This role will be heavily focused on R&D to enhance our platform, GO, with new and improved AI-powered capabilities.

This position will be based in our Palo Alto, CA office. Currently, Orbital Insight is fully remote (working from home) until at least the end of the year, due to COVID. Occasional travel may be required (only applicable post COVID).

Responsibilities

  • Execute against initiatives on our Computer Vision R&D roadmap, including investigations of new models, architectures, and paradigms for advancing the state of the art in Computer Vision for satellite and aerial imagery
  • Develop new models and techniques in object detection and semantic segmentation to further build up and improve our core capabilities
  • Communicate and publish research findings in a variety of media, including internal presentations, blog posts, patents, and papers
  • Report on research and other deliverables to key stakeholders across the Engineering and Product Management teams
  • Collaborate with other Computer Vision Scientists and Machine Learning Engineers to incorporate new techniques and models into our GO Platform
  • Design and implement methodologies and metrics for measuring and monitoring performance and active learning workflows to continuously improve our capabilities
  • Write proposals for new ideas in Computer Vision research that align with our company’s long-term roadmap

    • Qualifications

  • US Citizen required (eligible for US Gov. clearance)
  • Must have designed, trained, and deployed CV models in production (industry experience required)
  • MS or PhD Degree in computer science or related discipline. Degree in Computer Vision preferred
  • 3+ years experience in using CNNs for computer vision, machine learning, and/or image processing (familiarity with frameworks like Tensorflow/Pytorch, and model architectures like ResNet/Faster R-CNN/Mask R-CNN)
  • Demonstrable experience with automated analysis of satellite, aerial, or multispectral imagery
  • Solid software engineering skills (python preferred)
  • Expertise in deep learning, including semantic segmentation, object detection, and image classification. A strong publication record in these areas is a huge plus.
  • Experience with cloud computing (AWS or similar) is a plus

    • Additional Information

    Orbital Insight is a fast growing provider of geospatial data and geo­-analytic services to commercial, nonprofit and public sector clients across the globe. Leveraging advancements in computer vision and cloud computing, Orbital Insight is turning millions of images into a big picture understanding of the world that is quantitatively grounded in observation, creating unprecedented transparency, and empowering global decision makers with new sources of objective, quantified socio­-economic insights.

    We are backed by marquee investors such as Google Ventures, Sequoia Capital, In­-Q­- Tel and Bloomberg Beta, Orbital Insight is rapidly expanding its commercial and public sector capabilities. Come join us if you are unafraid to try new approaches and relentlessly seek to push the state of the art, taking projects all the way from prototype to production-ready.
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