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
• Candidate AI Policy: Planet embraces Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, and we encourage its responsible use. We understand that candidates may use various resources, including AI tools, to prepare for interviews and assessments
• However, during any live interview stage or when actively completing assessments for this position, the use of AI tools—e.g. Large Language Models (LLMs), deep fake technology, etc.—is strictly prohibited unless explicitly prompted by an interviewer or assessment instructions. If you are unsure about acceptable use, please contact your recruiter for clarification