Data Scientist - 3 / Team Lead

About SatSure

SatSure is a deep tech, decision intelligence company working at the nexus of agriculture, infrastructure, and climate action — creating impact for the other millions, with a focus on the developing world. As part of this mission, we're building geospatial foundation models that learn directly from Earth observation data — optical, SAR, and elevation — at scale. This role sits at the heart of that effort: architecting and training large-scale models that can generalize across geographies, sensors, and time. You'll be shaping the core intelligence layer that powers insights for millions, not just fine-tuning someone else's model.

Role:

We're looking for a senior Data Scientist to serve as technical lead for a team of 4-5 scientists working on geospatial AI. You'll set the technical direction for building ML systems that interpret satellite imagery at scale across agriculture, forestry, and environmental monitoring.

This is a player-coach role. You'll spend significant time hands-on with research and code, while also shaping the team's roadmap, mentoring junior scientists, and ensuring the work compounds into reliable, scalable systems.

Responsibilities:

Define and drive the technical roadmap for multiple concurrent ML/CV initiatives. Identify the highest-leverage problems and allocate effort accordingly.

Lead research on novel architectures and training strategies, and translate findings into production systems.

Mentor DS-1 and DS-2 scientists: help them scope problems, debug experiments, sharpen their research taste, and grow technically.

Own end-to-end delivery of large-scale ML systems, from problem framing through data design, model development, deployment, and monitoring.

Design robust experimental frameworks. Set standards for evaluation, reproducibility, and technical documentation across the team.

Collaborate with product, MLOps, platform, and geospatial teams to convert ambiguous requirements into clear technical plans.

Represent the team's work through publications and patents.

Assist science managers in project planning, hiring, and delivery.

Must Have:

5+ years of applied ML/Computer Vision experience, or PhD with 3+ years of post-degree experience, in CS, EE, or a related field.

Deep expertise in semantic/instance segmentation, object detection, encoder-decoder and transformer architectures, and temporal/sequential modelling.

Demonstrated technical leadership: setting direction for a team, driving architectural decisions, and raising the bar on research quality.

Experience mentoring researchers or setting technical direction for a small team.

Track record of peer-reviewed research publications at reputed venues or patents.

Proven experience shipping ML models from research through to production at scale.

Proficiency in PyTorch and Python. Strong software engineering skills with clean, maintainable code. Familiarity with distributed training and MLOps tooling.

Good to Have:

Experience with generative models (GANs, VAEs, diffusion), self-supervised and contrastive learning, domain adaptation and generalisation, super-resolution, or model compression.

Experience with geospatial or remote sensing data (satellite imagery, multi-spectral or SAR data, temporal modelling).

Exposure to agricultural applications (crop classification, crop monitoring) or forestry applications (canopy height estimation, deforestation monitoring).

Experience with foundation models, large-scale pre-training, or cross-modal fusion.

Benefits:

Medical Health Cover for you and your family including unlimited online doctor consultations

Access to mental health experts for you and your family

Dedicated allowances for learning and skill development

Comprehensive leave policy with casual leaves, paid leaves, marriage leaves, bereavement leaves