Engineering Manager, Land Cover Monitoring

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:  

The Planetary Variables division is looking for an Engineering Manager to lead the Land Cover Monitoring team. This team is responsible for the development of new algorithms, integration into production systems and maintenance via ML operations. Currently, this team owns the Road and Building monitoring products, which include global weekly mapping and change detection. In addition, the team supports the inference systems that generate cloud masks of all images produced by Planet. These algorithms are typically a combination of computer vision (DL & non-DL) and time series, all cemented in statistical and physical principles. 

In this role, you will lead a team of engineers working together on algorithm development and integration into our distributed compute platform. You will also strengthen the processes for model training and maintenance, such as creation of ground truth datasets, design of labeling tools, managing a labeling workforce and setting up data monitoring systems. A solid background in applied statistics and scientific computing is desired, as well as  experience building data products.

The Land Cover team is remote and distributed across North America.   

Impact You’ll Own:

• Lead a team of 5+ machine learning engineers 
• Hire new engineers according to product strategy, which you will help develop
• Mentor, coach and unblock your team members, helping them succeed and grow their careers
• Set up team processes for task planning, code reviews and on-call rotations
• Instill scientific methods to test and promote new algorithms 
• Establish sound engineering practices to build software and design training & inference pipelines
• Supervise recurring ML operations for production algorithms (monitoring, training, benchmarking, deploying, etc)
• Work closely with product management and other cross functional teams

What You Bring:

• 4+ years of experience as a software engineer, data scientist or ML engineer in industry
• 2+ years of experience as a manager
• Solid understanding of fundamentals in remote sensing, statistics and machine learning
• Experience working with sensor data
• Experience with distributed cloud computing
• Experience with geospatial python libraries (e.g. pyproj, rasterio, shapely, etc) and scientific python libraries (e.g. numpy, scipy, TensorFlow, etc)
• Proficiency with Linux, Git, Docker
• Excellent technical communication and documentation skills

What Makes You Stand Out:

• PhD in remote sensing or related field
• Proven record of team growth and product releases 
• Experience maintaining ML models in production

Benefits While Working at Planet:

• Comprehensive Health Plan
• Wellness program and onsite massages in specific offices
• Flexible Time Off
• Recognition Programs
• Commuter Benefits
• Learning and Tuition Reimbursement
• Parental Leave
• Offsites and Happy Hours
• Volunteering Benefits

Compensation:

The US base salary range for this full-time position at the commencement of employment is $124,000 - $203,000.  Additionally, this role might be eligible for discretionary short-term and long-term incentives (bonus and equity). The final salary range is determined by job related experience, skills and location.  The range displays our typical hiring range for new hire salaries in US locations only.  Your recruiter can share