Senior Backend Architect — Remote, Scalable Storage

Planet Labs PBC; United States; Remote; USD 143,000 - 179,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

HSA contributions

Paid time off

Parental leave

Wellness program

Home office support

Phone stipend

Tuition reimbursement

Equity

Commuter benefits

Volunteer PTO

Job summary

Planet Labs PBC is hiring a Senior Software Engineer for its Storage platform, building and evolving scalable object storage and metadata services. You will influence data lifecycle, indexing, search, and disaster recovery, collaborating across teams in a remote-first setup.

The role requires 6–8 years of backend experience, Go and Python expertise, and strong knowledge of cloud-native systems, databases, and distributed architectures.

Qualifications

• 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

Responsibilities

• 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

Skills

Go

Python

Distributed systems

Remote collaboration

Communication

Code quality

Tools

Kubernetes

Terraform

AWS

GCP

PostgreSQL

MySQL

Elasticsearch

Job description

Planet Labs PBC is hiring a Senior Software Engineer for its Storage platform, building and evolving scalable object storage and metadata services. You will influence data lifecycle, indexing, search, and disaster recovery, collaborating across teams in a remote-first setup.

The role requires 6–8 years of backend experience, Go and Python expertise, and strong knowledge of cloud-native systems, databases, and distributed architectures.