SlipstreamJobs tracks this role from the company's public career site. Apply directly on the employer's site.
Salary: CAD 195,000 - 235,000 / annual
SkyWatch is a satellite data platform that democratizes access to earth observation imagery and insights for businesses, researchers, and governments. The company aggregates data from dozens of satellite providers and serves it through APIs, AI-powered agents, and partner storefronts.
As Principal Platform Engineer, you will be the technical leader of SkyWatch's commercial platform—the foundation that every customer and product depends on. You report directly to the CEO and have real influence over what gets built and how.
Your core responsibilities include:
- Setting the technical architecture and engineering standards for the platform, including imagery ingest and processing, data cataloguing, identity and enterprise sign-in, semantic search, and agent infrastructure.
- Owning the roadmap and delivery of the platform against product direction, working closely with the Chief Product Officer.
- Meeting regularly with customers and translating their feedback into roadmap priorities; measuring and optimizing the time from customer request to shipped solution.
- Overseeing the design and architecture of agentic products, including retrieval, tools, evaluation, answer quality and latency.
- Rebuilding the development lifecycle around AI: agents that write, review and test code, evals in CI, and a release process fast enough to keep pace with AI capabilities.
- Maintaining a high bar for user experience across the API, developer experience, agent outputs, and product workflows.
- Leading and growing the platform and data engineering team: hiring, technical mentorship, performance, and priorities.
- Designing reviews, testing, observability, and reliability standards that hold up at speed.
- Making trade-off decisions that balance customer value, business impact, and technical feasibility.
You are hands-on: you design the hard parts, review important changes, unblock the team, and ship fixes within days of hearing customer problems. The best version of this role hears a customer's problem on Monday, writes the design on Tuesday, and ships the fix that week.
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 track record of turning customer feedback into shipped product quickly.
- Shipped products, APIs, or developer experiences that set a high bar for usability.
- Hands-on experience shipping LLM, retrieval, or agent systems as products, with evaluation in production.
- Evidence of using AI tools to measurably accelerate a team's development lifecycle.
- Experience making build decisions with business trade-offs (cost to serve, pricing, 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).
