Senior Software Engineering Manager
Planet Labs Inc.About the role
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 is looking for a Senior Engineering Manager with a proven background in guiding and mentoring high-performing engineering teams.
In this role, you will be responsible for the Defense Intelligence Integration engineering team. The mission of this team is to bring Planet’s catalog of imagery and tasking to large Defense & Intelligence customers. Your work will be highly visible and will directly impact the ability of customers to get faster access to Planet’s unprecedented datasets
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 team’s work, and organize that work in a way that best aligns with organizational and team practices. The team has a highly collaborative culture and is distributed remotely across the Earth.
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:
- Guide your team of software engineers and data scientists to deliver successful products for the Global Monitoring Service.
- Mentor, coach and unblock your team members, helping them succeed and grow their careers.
- Ensure efficient shipping of product improvements and features.
- Partner with your product management counterpart to define strategy and take tactical decisions.
- Refine and implement team processes, including for task planning, code reviews and on-call rotations.
- Establish sound engineering practices to build software and design training & inference pipelines.
- Collaborate across our engineering organization and other cross functional teams to align efforts, particularly concerning model maintenance, deployment pipelines, and new compute infrastructure needs.
What You Bring:
- 6+ years of related experience.
- 4+ years of experience as a manager, with ability to build, retain, and grow diverse, geographically dispersed teams.
- Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field.
- Excellent interpersonal skills, both verbal and written, with the ability to explain complex technical issues accurately to technical and non-technical audiences.
- Experience in delivering data-intensive software products at scale.
- Solid understanding of fundamentals in software engineering, statistics and machine learning.
- Success in establishing and evolving operational practices in a software engineering organization.
- Experience with change management, managing tech debt, and analyzing tradeoffs in solution builds.
- Experience with distributed cloud computing.
What Makes You Stand Out:
- Experience building products using sensor or geospatial data.
- Experience working with satellite or airborne earth observations data.
- Interest in defense, intelligence or spatial imagery.
#LI-REMOTE
Application Deadline:
May 16, 2026 at 11:59p PT
EAR/ITAR Requirements:
This position requires access to export-controlled information, and as such, employment (or hiring of a contractor) is contingent upon the candidate’s ability to access all applicable export-controlled information without additional export licensing being required by the Bureau of Industry and Security and/or the Directorate
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