Senior Engineering Manager, Platform Operations

Welcome to Planet. We believe in using space to help life on Earth.

Planet designs, builds, and operates the largest constellation of imaging satellites in history. This constellation delivers an unprecedented dataset of empirical information via a revolutionary cloud-based platform to authoritative figures in commercial, environmental, and humanitarian sectors. We are both a space company and data company all rolled into one.

Customers and users across the globe use Planet's data to develop new technologies, drive revenue, power research, and solve our world’s toughest obstacles.

As we control every component of hardware design, manufacturing, data processing, and software engineering, our office is a truly inspiring mix of experts from a variety of domains.

We have a people-centric approach toward culture and community and we strive to iterate in a way that puts our team members first and prepares our company for growth. Join Planet and be a part of our mission to change the way people see the world.

Planet is a global company with employees working remotely world wide and joining us from offices in San Francisco, Washington DC, Germany, and The Netherlands.

About the Role:  

Planet is looking for a Senior Engineering Manager with a proven background in hiring, mentoring, and leading high-functioning engineering teams.

In this role, you will lead the engineering team that owns and operates core infrastructure and tooling, and collaborate with fellow teams to minimize friction involved in bringing Planet services to production. Our infrastructure services span thousands of nodes and process terabytes of imagery data every day. You will ensure our infrastructure is highly reliable, secure, and scalable, and meets internal stakeholder needs.

This is very much a “servant leadership” role, with a high emphasis on enabling your team members to do their best work in an environment that sets them up for success. In particular, you’ll ensure engineers are unblocked on dependencies, take the lead in defining the “what” and “why” of the team’s work, and organize that work in a way that best aligns with organizational and team practices.

As part of the Infrastructure leadership team, you will work with your team and peers to build and execute a strategy that enables Planet’s mission with our core shared infrastructure built on Kubernetes and GCP. This will include things like observability, application delivery, container deployment, and orchestration with tools such as Kubernetes and CI/CD tooling. In the broadest sense, this team owns the set of technologies upon which we build, deploy, deliver, and operate our applications at Planet.

This role is deeply cross-functional, and building positive relationships across Product, Software Engineering, and Space Systems will be crucial to your success.

Impact You’ll Own:

• Collaborate across the engineering organization to align efforts, keep engineers unblocked, and ensure delivery of services/features/products
• Foster a culture of innovation and customer service within the team and the organization you support
• Evangelize the set of services your team owns across the engineering organizations in order to drive adoption of the architecture where required
• Work to establish technical standards and guidelines to ensure the integrity of our systems and compliance with company IT standards, policies and processes
• Contribute to the evolution of an infrastructure strategy that aligns with and supports Planet’s North Star and product strategy
• Cultivate a culture of operational excellence within Planet by promoting service observability, definition of and measurement against SLOs/SLIs, and operational readiness practices

What You Bring:

• Ability to build, retain, and grow diverse, geographically dispersed, high-performing teams
• Experience with managing teams that own and operate high-volume, highly available, scalable, distributed systems
• Experience owning large scale services on top of cloud providers like AWS and GCP
• Experience leading teams and driving organizational design, career development, operations, and culture in partnership with Product Managers and Engineering teams
• Demonstrated success in establishing and evolving operational practices in a software engineering organization

What Makes You Stand Out:

• Deep experience leading a team to building services on top of Google Cloud Platform
• Experience being responsible for operating a kubernetes based service architecture across dozens of clusters in multiple regions

Benefits While Working at Planet:

• Comprehensive Health Plan
• Wellness program and onsite mas