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:

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 rolled into one.

In this role, you will join Planet's Direct Access Service Infrastructure team, directly contributing to our next-generation Constellation as a Service platform. This platform represents a major new offering to our customers that goes beyond traditional cloud-based platforms and supports on-premises deployments. 

You will be responsible for building, deploying, and operating critical compute software that supports end-to-end imaging operations within customer on-premises and/or cloud environments. You will use your understanding of internal compute requirements as well as customers' environmental-specific constraints to help design, implement, and support a robust system for reproducible deployments across operating environments, to guarantee the reliability, scalability, and availability of our services. To do this, you will partner closely with cross-functional engineering teams to enable and empower the integration of software solutions and the troubleshooting of distributed systems.

This is a full-time, remote position based in the United States. If located near an office, you are expected to work from that office 3 days per week.

Impact You'll Own:

• Build and deploy computing services and infrastructure in customer environments for a next-generation satellite operations and image processing end-to-end platform
• Operate in a high-impact, tight knit team to architect novel systems for air-gapped deployments at scale
• Clarifying and surfacing requirements from ambiguous use cases defined by cross-functional stakeholders, including internal users and external customers
• Responsible for operations such as deployments, service orchestration, and documentation for cross platform stakeholders
• Scale architecture while ensuring availability of services
• Improve reliability and scalability by resolving edge cases, studying failure modes, and writing tests
• Participate in on-call rotations to ensure operational excellence

What You Bring:

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or similar
• 10+ years of experience building services that leverage cloud-native infrastructure and tooling
• Experience deploying and maintaining bare-metal and cloud kubernetes through tools such as Talos, RKE2, Proxmox, or k3s
• Proficient with Terraform, Ansible, Helm, Kustomize, and/or similar IaC / GitOps tooling
• Experience successfully building, releasing, and supporting highly available, consistently performant services
• Knowledge of hardware and network level implications of on-prem compute
• Experience with platform optimization, particularly resource optimization, management, and cluster tuning in a constrained environment
• Ability to observe and troubleshoot distributed systems with tools such as Alloy, Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry
• Advanced skills in Python, Bash, and other tooling as appropriate to build services and meet product goals
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to work through collaboration with cross-functional engineering teams
• Experience working with Jira for task management and progress tracking

What Makes You Stand Out: <