Software Engineering Manager, Mission Management

BlackSky is a real-time intelligence company specializing in satellite imagery, automated analytics, and high-frequency monitoring of strategic locations, economic assets, and global events. Trusted by military, intelligence organizations, and commercial companies, BlackSky provides foresight to enable rapid decision-making for national security and economic advantage.

BlackSky is seeking a thoughtful and technically strong Engineering Manager to lead the Mission Management Engineering team. This integrated product team is responsible for developing and maintaining optimal, automated autonomous operations for the BlackSky satellite constellation. The manager will guide engineers who design, build, and operate software that autonomously plans imaging and communication activities across the constellation while meeting performance goals.

The role involves providing technical direction, building healthy engineering processes, and fostering a culture of curiosity, safety, and ownership. You will collaborate with mission operations, spacecraft engineering, product teams, and program leadership to ensure the team meets both commercial production goals and program-driven requirements. This includes balancing long-term reliability with rapid iteration, supporting operational readiness for live constellation needs, and delivering capabilities aligned with customer commitments and program milestones.

You will help your team reason about complex autonomous systems where reliability is as critical as performance. Success in this role means enabling your team to deliver high-quality, dependable software, ensuring operational excellence, communicating effectively across disciplines, and supporting engineers in developing their careers while fostering a collaborative, mission-focused environment.

This role is strongly preferred to be in the Seattle, WA area.

Who You Are:

• An effective people manager who is excited to guide, coach, and scale a team.
• A technical leader who can provide clear architectural direction while empowering engineers to make informed decisions and grow their expertise.
• An organized planner who can translate evolving priorities into clear roadmaps, break work into actionable tasks, and drive predictable execution.
• A collaborator with experience partnering across cross-functional teams within an organization.
• A dependable executor who drives clear priorities, sets realistic expectations, and ensures consistent delivery of high-quality results.
• A culture builder who values collaboration, inclusivity, psychological safety, and continuous improvement—and actively models these behaviors.

Responsibilities:

• Build, develop, and lead the Mission Management engineering team responsible for autonomous satellite operations planning.
• Work with leadership to drive prioritization and planning across Mission Management projects, ensuring alignment with business goals, customer commitments, and mission operations.
• Partner with flight operations, flight software, ground software, mission planning, systems engineering, product, and program leadership to clarify requirements, align priorities, and maintain a strong end-to-end understanding of system behavior.
• Provide technical direction and architectural guidance for orchestrating constellation activities.
• Establish and continuously improve engineering processes, including design reviews, code reviews, testing practices, system and satellite safety considerations, and operational readiness.
• Foster a healthy on-call culture and ensure effective support of live operational systems, including incident response, root-cause analysis, and long-term corrective actions.
• Drive roadmap planning, resource allocation, and execution across multiple projects, balancing rapid iteration with long-term reliability and availability.
• Hire, onboard, coach, and evaluate engineers, emphasizing skill development, collaboration, and accountability.
• Perform other leadership tasks as required to ensure the success of the team and mission.
• Support launch and early operations of new satellites.

Required Qualifications:

• A Bachelor’s or Master’s degree or higher in computer science, mathematics, physics, statistics, or another computational field.
• A minimum of 8 years of professional experience in software engineering, including experience building or operating complex distributed, autonomous, or mission-critical systems.
• At least 2 years of experience leading engineering teams as a people manager or technical lead with formal leadership responsibilities.
• A strong technical background in one or more programming languages (e.g., Go, Python, C++), with the ability to provide architectural guidance and review complex designs.
• Experience developing and deploying microservices in cloud environments (e.g., AWS, GCP, Azure) and on-premises Kubernetes-based systems.
• A solid understanding of CI/CD pipelines, automated testing strategies, version control, and operational best practices.
• Demonstrated ability to manage priorities, coordinate across teams, and deliver results in fast-paced environments with operational dependencies.
• Excellent communication, collaboration, and conflict resolution skills, especially in cross-functional settings.
• Some programs this role supports may require the candidate to be a U.S. citizen.

Preferred Qualifications:

• A Master’s degree (or higher) in a relevant technical field.
• Experience managing teams working with infrastructure-as-code tools (e.g., Terraform, Ansible), container orchestration (e.g., Kubernetes, Nomad), or distributed systems.
• Knowledge of system safety, fault tolerance, redundancy, and recovery strategies in autonomous or operationally sensitive environments.
• A background in satellite operations, ground stations, or aerospace domains (e.g., orbital mechanics, attitude dynamics, and satellite systems).
• Experience with automation of complex systems (satellite, vehicle fleets, drones, etc.).
• Expertise in software/hardware performance characteristics.
• Knowledge of geospatial systems or data.
• Prior experience aligning engineering execution with both commercial production SLAs and program-specific requirements, deliverables, or milestones.