Software Engineering Manager

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 Software Engineering Manager with a proven background in hiring, mentoring, and leading high-functioning engineering teams. In this role, you will lead the engineering team that owns large scale compute processing systems that supports imagery transformation and delivery. These systems are primarily responsible for backing external customer access to the data products we create from the continuous flow of satellite imagery. Our infrastructure services span thousands of nodes and process terabytes of imagery data every day. You will ensure our infrastructure is highly reliable, secure, and scalable, and meets internal stakeholder needs.

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 “what” and “why” of the team’s work, and organize that work in a way that best aligns with organizational and team practices. This role is deeply cross-functional, and building positive relationships across Product, Software Engineering, and Space Systems will be crucial to your success.

As part of the Infrastructure & Enablement leadership team, you will work with your team and peers to build and execute a strategy that enables Planet’s mission with our core shared compute infrastructure built on Kubernetes and public clouds. This will include things like capacity planning, scalability, observability, and orchestration with supported and managed platform tooling. You will also support internal customers that run image processing, analytics, and delivery operations on our compute services.

This is a full-time, remote position based in the United States or Canada.

Impact You'll Own:

• Collaborate across the engineering organization to align efforts, keep engineers unblocked, and ensure delivery of services/features/products
• Foster a culture of innovation and customer service within the team and the organization you support
• Evangelize the set of services your team owns across the engineering organizations in order to drive adoption of the architecture where required
• Ensure that the team is utilizing best practices for software development, testing, and deployment
• Contribute to the evolution of a computing infrastructure strategy that aligns with and supports Planet’s North Star and product strategy
• Own team roadmap strategy and execution against the roadmap priorities

What You Bring:

• 4-6 years of relevant work experience, with 2+ years of supervisory or leadership experience
• Ability to build, retain, and grow diverse, geographically dispersed, high-performing teams
• Experience with managing teams that own and operate high-volume, highly available, scalable, distributed systems
• Experience building infrastructure/tooling at scale that gains widespread adoption
• Experience with growing team members through career development coaching, technical or non-technical mentoring,  and creating an open and healthy team culture
• Proven asynchronous communication skills and ability to collaborate cross-functionally with partner Engineering and Product teams
• Demonstrated experience with driving large scale initiatives that require communication and coordination across multiple departments
• Experience working with various Agile methodologies and project management frameworks

What Makes You Stand Out: