About Orbital Sentry

Orbital Sentry is delivering the world's first 24/7 persistent livestream of Earth. While current satellite constellations provide periodic "snapshots," our dual-use geosynchronous platforms offer uninterrupted monitoring at a temporal cadence unmatched by any existing system. As we expand beyond our founding team, we are looking for mission-driven pioneers ready to build the future of space infrastructure from the ground up. If you want to skip the corporate bureaucracy and have a direct, visible presence at a space company, you belong here.

At Orbital Sentry we hire good people and trust them to get the work done. We embrace a culture that is opposed to micromanagement and believe in empowering our employees to accomplish their work in the manner that suits them most effectively. Orbital Sentry is a remote-first environment meaning all our team members must have strong communication and documentation skills and possess a willingness to adhere to core hours for meetings. We focus on being pragmatic, conscientious, and proactive, with a side of joviality.

About the Role

We are looking for a Director of Data Processing and Platform. This critical hire will oversee the architecting and initial buildout of Orbital Sentry's platform stack spanning image processing through customer-facing platforms. This is a founding hire and is expected to operate as a staff engineer (player-coach) and will play an incredibly critical role in our success over the next few years. You'll gather requirements directly from our commercial partners across insurance, utilities, and defense, and translate those requirements into the technical decisions that shape how our data pipeline and software platform get built. You'll work closely with our Director of Space Systems on how sensor data flows into the platform layer, and with our Chief Business Officer on how that platform serves very different buyers with very different requirements, timelines, and compliance needs.

You are expected to own the architecture decisions, direct execution (through contractors, early hires, and your own hands-on work), and build the function as the company scales. If you've ever wanted to build something from the ground up, this role is for you.

This position reports directly to the CEO and will have a wide range of responsibilities and authorities. This role owns the translation layer between commercial requirements and technical architecture and will interface heavily with the CBO. As Orbital Sentry grows, this high-impact role will continue to expand into a key leadership role. Orbital Sentry is a remote-first organization. You can anticipate at least twice-yearly required meetups with the team.

What You'll Do

• Own the Data Processing and Platform Architecture: Working closely with our partner customers and Space team, you will develop requirements for our data pipelines that support different product levels across our entire customer base.

• Establish baseline processes and standards for our pipeline architecture, including best practices in security, deployment, and delivery.

• Oversee our Synthetic Data Program: Working closely with our Chief Business Officer, oversee the development of our synthetic data. These data sets will be provided to our customers in advance of launch to gather feedback and requirements. Iterate on our synthetic data with customers and leverage learnings to input to our data pipelines.

• Architect Orbital Sentry's Data Platform: You will work with customers to develop platform prototypes to ensure customers can easily receive and use Orbital Sentry products. This will require fundamental decisions like selection of a cloud provider up through making early design choices for the interfaces.

• Deliver the MVP build-out of our Data Processing Pipeline and Platform: You will build out our MVP data processing pipeline and platform for initial commercial operations. This effort will be a mix of managing Orbital Sentry staff, overseeing contractors that may support this work, and writing code yourself.

Required Technical Attributes

• 8+ years of remote sensing software engineering experience

• Experience with cloud-native architectures

• Experience and willingness to implement enterprise-grade code bases leveraging tools such as GitLab CI, Docker, and Kubernetes

• Expertise in developing image processing pipelines

• Experience leveraging AI development tools to uplevel your coding, such as Claude Code or Microsoft Co-Pilot as well as the discernment to know when to leverage these tools

• Previous experience developing customer-facing platforms or applications, preferably for enterprise customers

Expected Personal Attributes

• Technical Leadership: A track record of technical leadership in data engineering, platform architecture, or a closely related discipline, ideally in a company that sells into regulated, technical, or public-sector buyers.

• Strong product instincts: This role sits at the intersection of "what should we build" and "how do we build it," and you need real judgment on both sides. Experience translating ambiguous, cross-functional requirements into clear technical direction.

• Customer Engagement Skills: You have the willingness and ability to engage with customers on a regular basis to gather technical requirements (NOT a sales role).

• High Initiative: You are a self-starter who thrives with limited supervision and loves building structure out of ambiguity. Comfort operating without an existing team or established process. You'll be building the playbook, not inheriting one.

• Collaborative Mindset: You can easily balance the needs of multiple stakeholders against the practical constraints of building a platform, keeping teams aligned and moving forward.

• Education: Bachelor's degree required.

Additional Must-Haves

• Citizenship and Location: US Citizenship required and must be based in the US.

• Willingness and ability to travel for minimum of twice-yearly meetups with the team and for customer meetings as needed (up to 20%).

Nice to Have Attributes

• Experience working with an Earth Observation organization or company

• An active TS/SCI security clearance and/or ability to get one

• Previous 0-1 startup experience as a founding team member

• Familiarity with space systems and satellite operations

• Familiarity with STAC