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