Senior Software Engineer, Planet

• The ideal candidate works independently, takes ownership of technical direction, has experience building large-scale backend systems, and strengthens the team through engineering judgment and collaboration
• 10+ years of software engineering experience of which:
• 6+ years of Go development experience building production backend services
• 6+ years of Python development experience building customer-facing 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 driving architectural decisions and guiding technical trade-offs across a team
• Experience supporting the growth of engineers around you through collaboration and knowledge sharing
• Ability to lead system design conversations 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 systems that operate at massive scale
• 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
• Shape technical approach and system design for the team's high-impact projects
• Help engineers on the team grow through code reviews, pairing, and design discussions
• 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: September 17, 2026 at 11:59p PT