Senior AI Geospatial Lead - Forensics & Change Detection

Planet

San Francisco (CA)

Hybrid

USD 182,900 - 228,600

Full time

14 days+

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Benefits offered by this job

Medical coverage

HSA contribution

Paid time off

Parental leave

Wellness program

Home office reimbursement

Phone stipend

Tuition reimbursement

Equity

Commuter benefits

Volunteer PTO

Job summary

Planet is seeking a Senior Engineering Manager to guide a high-velocity squad in SF, delivering an AI Geospatial Assistant from private alpha to GA. You’ll drive operational excellence, define success thresholds, and partner with Product/Design to build a realistic technical roadmap.

The role emphasizes AI-native practices, talent development, and cross-functional leadership. The position requires 6+ years of experience, 4+ years leading software teams, and a track record of scaling founding

Qualifications

6+ years of relevant experience.
4+ years of experience leading software engineering teams.
Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field.
Track record of hiring and leading founding engineering teams in a startup or high-growth intrapreneurial environment.
Personally AI-native: write production code with AI tools, hold strong opinions on AI’s impact on the SDLC, and build a culture where AI is a core collaborator.
Experience leading AI engineering teams that successfully elevate research prototypes into production-grade applications.
Expertise in the human element of engineering—managing conflict, delivering difficult feedback, and maintaining motivation through early-stage pivots.
Ability to identify process bugs and implement cultural or structural changes to restore velocity.
Technical breadth: synthesize input from AI researchers and frontend experts to make sound architectural and personnel decisions; identify optimizations requiring cross-team collaboration.
Pragmatic execution: a “good-enough—move-on” mentality that avoids perfectionism at the cost of customer value.
Impact focus: excited by building an application that, once launched, gives researchers, journalists, governments, and NGOs the ability to explore the world using natural language and surface crucial insights.
Experience with geospatial data or planetary-scale analytics is highly preferred.

Responsibilities

Build a high-density talent engine: responsibility for the full talent lifecycle, from sourcing and hiring to designing an onboarding experience that gets specialists productive in a complex geospatial domain.
Establish a culture of extreme ownership: define accountability in a high-uncertainty, non-deterministic AI environment.
Team operations: design and iterate on the team’s operating system (sprint cadences, RFC processes, automated testing) to support the shift from research to product.
Collaborate with AI researchers: translate research into production-ready systems that deliver real value to users.
Establish evaluation-led development: ensure the team builds automated benchmarks before building features to measure improvement velocity.
Career architecture & mentorship: coach a diverse group of engineers, maintain psychological safety and engagement.
Strategic road-mapping & de-risking: partner with Product and Design to translate vision into a realistic technical roadmap and identify early technical risks.
Cross-functional leadership: act as a board-of-directors member alongside Product and Design to keep engineering laser-focused on forensics and change-detection use cases.