Chief Applied AI Scientist, Geospatial & Data

MAXAR TECHNOLOGIES, INC.; Herndon (VA); On-site; USD 182,000 - 266,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

401(k) with company match

Mental health resources

Student loan repayment assistance

Adoption reimbursement

Pet insurance

Job summary

Vantor seeks a seasoned Applied AI leader to drive AI science across geospatial and multimodal domains. You will mentor senior scientists, align technical priorities with customer needs, and deliver deployable AI capabilities at scale.

Join a mission-driven team focused on rapid experimentation, robust evaluation, and safe, scalable AI systems within a fast-paced, cross-functional environment. Eligible for security clearance as required for U.S. government-related work.

Qualifications

• Must be a United States citizen and eligible to obtain a security clearance.
• 10+ years of experience in machine learning, applied AI, data science, AI engineering, decision science, or related field.
• 5+ years of experience leading technical teams, including applied scientists, ML engineers, AI researchers, data scientists, or equivalent talent.
• Strong technical depth in multimodal AI, vision-language models, LLMs, reasoning systems, agentic AI, computer vision, geospatial AI, remote sensing, predictive modeling, causal inference, experimentation, or large-scale ML systems.
• Experience building end-to-end ML systems, including data pipelines, training workflows, evaluation frameworks, scalable inference, model monitoring, and retraining.
• Experience defining experimentation standards, model evaluation frameworks, causal inference approaches, or launch-readiness criteria for AI/ML products.
• Strong understanding of modern AI infrastructure, including cloud-based ML platforms, distributed training, containerized deployment, model serving, dataset versioning, and experiment tracking.

Responsibilities

• Lead, grow, and develop a high-performing team of Applied AI Scientists working across geospatial AI, multimodal learning, vision-language models, LLMs, reasoning systems, predictive modeling, and production ML.
• Define and execute the Applied AI Science roadmap, translating ambiguous customer, market, and mission needs into clear technical priorities, measurable milestones, and deployable AI capabilities.
• Guide the design and productionalization of AI-driven applications that transform large-scale geospatial, imagery, structured, and contextual data into actionable insights, predictive signals, and decision intelligence.
• Champion the adoption of agentic AI as a force multiplier for the Applied AI Science organization, using AI agents to accelerate research, experimentation, evaluation, documentation, code review, and production support.
• Identify and automate high-friction scientific workflows, reducing cycle time from hypothesis to validated production capability while improving output quality and repeatability.
• Establish standards for safe, reliable, and auditable use of AI agents across model development, experimentation, evaluation, and operational workflows.

Job description

Vantor seeks a seasoned Applied AI leader to drive AI science across geospatial and multimodal domains. You will mentor senior scientists, align technical priorities with customer needs, and deliver deployable AI capabilities at scale.

Join a mission-driven team focused on rapid experimentation, robust evaluation, and safe, scalable AI systems within a fast-paced, cross-functional environment. Eligible for security clearance as required for U.S. government-related work.