Senior Software Engineer, Planet

• 6–8 years of software engineering experience
• Demonstrated software development experience in Go, Python, or similar modern languages building production backend services and APIs
• Fluency with AI-assisted development tools (e.g. Claude, Copilot) as part of your daily engineering workflow
• Experience monitoring and operating highly scalable cloud-native software
• Experience with relational datastores (PostgreSQL or MySQL) and non-relational datastores (e.g. BigTable, Elasticsearch) and an understanding of when to use each
• Experience building, releasing, and supporting highly available, consistently performant services
• Excellent communication skills and an ability to work well in a remote setting
• Experience improving codebases, documentation, and team practices through regular contributions beyond feature work
• Experience exercising judgment in selecting methods and adapting complex techniques for obtaining results
• Ability to advise team members on complex technical matters and adapt communication styles for key contacts
• Ability to analyze complex issues and provide in-depth technical evaluation for distributed backend services

Desirable

• The Storage team at Planet builds and expands the core object and metadata storage platform that underpins the company's data infrastructure
• The platform provides a horizontally scalable architecture that lets teams across the organization focus on what they do best while Storage handles data lifecycle, indexing, search, and all day-2 operations of managing a datastore at scale
• Planet's constellation captures petabytes of imagery that powers everything from climate monitoring to disaster response and precision agriculture — and the Storage team makes sure that data is reliably stored, discoverable, and accessible
• We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help evolve this platform. You'll work across the stack — from object storage and metadata indexing to event notification and disaster recovery — on complex systems that operate at massive scale
• The ideal candidate acts as an advisor to others, brings specialized depth of expertise, applies broad knowledge of engineering principles, and strengthens the team through technical analysis and collaboration
• Build and maintain systems that provide efficient access to new and growing data sets
• Extend and improve services for internal data search and image processing
• Operate and tune Elasticsearch indexing for core data sets
• Full service ownership by measuring performance, creating alerts, being on call, and responding to incidents and performance anomalies
• Determine methods and procedures on new assignments, evaluating variable factors to deliver complex solutions
• Act as an advisor to others and lead project teams or oversee assignments of lower-level engineers
• Contribute to the technical roadmap and help shape the architectural direction of the team's systems
• Participate in design reviews and help drive alignment on technical decisions

• Application Deadline: November 25, 2026 at 11:59p PT
• AI in Our Interviewing Process: Planet is committed to providing an exceptional interview experience for all candidates. We currently use Metaview to better focus on candidates and less on trying to capture notes
• As such, with the candidate's consent, select interviews may be recorded and include a "Planet AI Notetaker" for transcription and summarization purposes
• Should an interview involve use of AI interview technologies, the candidate will receive notification and have the ability to opt out both in advance and/or real-time. Opting out will not affect one's candidacy