Senior 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, Austria, Slovenia, and The Netherlands.

About the Role:  

We are seeking a talented Senior Software Engineer with expertise in designing, developing and deploying machine learning solutions at scale to join our team. This role is at the intersection of machine learning (ML), software engineering, and remote sensing, focusing on building innovative systems that extract actionable insights from satellite imagery for applications in agriculture, forestry, climate, land management and more. Our projects include mapping crop activities, detecting land changes, measuring forest carbon stocks, roads, buildings and other topics at the intersection of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and Earth Observation. You'll join a passionate, innovative, and distributed team that values collaboration and fosters a culture of continuous learning and impact-driven engineering.

In this role, you will work with a team to design, develop and deploy robust, scalable machine learning workflows and integrate them into distributed systems for real-world applications. You will help build tools to analyze remote sensing data from diverse sources to extract actionable insights. Your work will involve designing and enhancing machine learning infrastructure for training, evaluation, and inference on global-scale datasets, ensuring performance and reliability. You will help build connections to other internal systems, making sure the interfaces are stable, secure and reliable. You will contribute to both high- and low-level end-to-end system development, including backend and API design, with occasional involvement in front-end and DevOps tasks to ensure seamless functionality of geospatial applications. Collaboration will be key as you work closely with a distributed team of scientists, engineers, and clients across Europe and North America, incorporating feedback to refine and enhance products. You will also establish and maintain machine learning operations workflows to monitor and optimize the performance of deployed models. 

This is a full-time, hybrid role which will require you to work from our Ljubljana or Haarlem office 3 days per week.

Impact You’ll Own:

• Scalable infrastructure: Design and improve ML infrastructure for training, evaluation, and inference on global-scale datasets, ensuring high performance and reliability.
• End-to-end system development: Contribute to full-stack development, from backend and APIs to front-end and DevOps tasks, enabling seamless integration and functionality of geospatial applications.
• Collaborative innovation: Work closely with a distributed team of scientists, engineers, and clients across Europe and North America, incorporating feedback to refine products and processes.
• ML Ops: Establish and maintain machine learning operations workflows to monitor and enhance deployed models' performance over time.

What You Bring:

• Bachelor's degree in Software Engineering/Computer Science or related discipline 
• 6+ years of relevant work experience
• Experience engineering in Python/Java/Go and/or similar programming languages
• Experience delivering production-grade machine learning systems at scale, with a focus on real-world applications.
• Experience with MLOps workflows to monitor, maintain, and optimize deployed machine learning models.
• Problem-solving skills and ability to iterate based on feedback from clients or partners.
• Experience with end-to-end system design, including backend development, database management, and occasional front-end contr