Staff Software Engineer

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:  

In this role, you will be the technical leader for the Customer Growth Infrastructure team. You will be responsible for architectural design and building infrastructure and software that manages the authentication and authorization layers controlling access to the Planet platform. You will be required to have a sharp product sense, work with other technical leaders to deliver architecture that aids in development velocity, deliver work incrementally,  and de-risk hard problems. You will also be required to have a compelling vision towards creating the Earth Data Platform as we evolve from providing imagery and data to providing components and tools to build business solutions on earth data. 

Our tech stack is Go, Python, Postgres, BigQuery, Pub/Sub, and Kubernetes running on Google’s Cloud. We believe strongly in engineering resilient software through a solid software engineering process.

The Customer Growth Infrastructure team is highly distributed and you will thrive in an environment of remote work and asynchronous communication. You’re expected to have strong communication skills and be able to develop working relationships with coworkers in locations across several North American time zones. The ideal candidate is a self-starter, creative, and has experience building large scale backend systems.

Impact You’ll Own:

• Building large-scale services and APIs in Go and Python to provide administration, authentication, and access control to the Planet platform
• Understanding design tradeoffs when designing technical solutions for our user focused stories for both internal and external users
• Writing high-quality, maintainable, highly-available, well-documented  production code
• Evaluating system risks and improving reliability via code, process, documentation, architecture and other improvements
• Owning operation of services by measuring performance, creating alerts, runbooks, and responding to incidents and performance anomalies during on-call rotations
• Mentoring and coaching the team and instilling best practices across the software organization

What You Bring:

• 7+ years of experience in software development, with an emphasis on backend services with a customer focus
• Experience as a tech lead or equivalent role on a fullstack or backend software engineering team
• Excellent knowledge of software engineering best practices, including coding standards, code reviews, source control management, and testing methodologies
• Experience building services that leverage cloud-based infrastructure and tooling such as AWS or GCP
• Excellent problem-solving, analytical, and communication skills
• Experience working cross-functionally and in a fast-paced environment
• History of working with monitoring tools like SignalFX, New Relic and Graphite (or equivalent)
• Comfortable with using Docker containers in a production environment
• Experience with SQL databases (Postgres or MySQL) and NoSQL databases (e.g. Bigtable, Redis, HBase, etc.), and understand when to use each
• Experience with a large shared codebase and Continuous Integration and Deployment workflows and tooling
• Comfortable with distributed systems concepts, reasoning about concurrency and making consistency tradeoffs
• Comfortable working in a Linux operational environment. Experience using and troubleshooting networking APIs and other system calls. While this is a software engineering team, we do largely manage our own operations (with the exception of Kubernetes control/worker pools, CI to