Senior Software Engineer, Go & Elasticsearch (Remote US/CA) NEW

The Briefed; United States; Hybrid; USD 143,000 - 179,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical coverage

Dental & vision

Parental leave (16 wks)

Home office + internet

Tuition support

Job summary

Planet is seeking a senior backend engineer to evolve our data storage and search platforms. You will build scalable services and own end-to-end reliability in a fully remote team across the United States and Canada.

Ideal candidates have 6–8 years in software engineering, strong backend experience in Go or Python, and hands-on work with both relational and non-relational stores. Knowledge of Elasticsearch and cloud platforms is a plus.

Qualifications

• 6 to 8 years of software engineering experience.
• Backend services and APIs in Go or Python.
• Experience with relational and non-relational stores (PostgreSQL/MySQL, BigTable/Elasticsearch).
• Experience with cloud-native, highly available services.
• Daily use of AI coding tools (Claude, Copilot).
• Effective communication in a remote team.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain fast data access systems for growing data sets.
• Improve internal data search and image processing services.
• Tune Elasticsearch indexing for core data sets.
• Own services including metrics, alerts, and incident response.
• Shape technical roadmap and participate in design reviews.
• Lead projects and mentor less experienced engineers.

Skills

Go

Python

Cloud-native

Distributed systems

Elasticsearch

PostgreSQL

Communication

Tools

Kubernetes

Terraform

AWS

GCP

Job description

Planet's satellites capture petabytes of imagery used for climate monitoring, disaster response and farming. The Storage team runs the object and metadata storage platform under all of it: data lifecycle, indexing, search and operations at scale. You help evolve that platform and advise other engineers.

Key responsibilities

• Build and maintain systems that give fast access to new and growing data sets
• Improve internal data search and image processing services
• Run and tune Elasticsearch indexing for core data sets
• Own services fully: metrics, alerts, on-call and incident response
• Shape the team's technical roadmap and take part in design reviews
• Lead projects and guide less experienced engineers

Requirements

• 6 to 8 years of software engineering
• Production backend services and APIs in Go, Python or a similar language
• Relational (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and non-relational stores (BigTable, Elasticsearch)
• Running highly available, cloud-native services
• Daily use of AI coding tools such as Claude or Copilot
• Clear communication in a remote team

Nice to have

• 6+ years each of Go and Python
• Kubernetes and Terraform
• AWS or GCP, and any work with geospatial data

Remote details

• Full-time, remote, for people based in the United States or Canada
• If you live near a Planet office, you work from it 3 days a week

Salary and benefits

US base salary $142,800 to $178,500 a year, plus possible bonus and equity.

• medical
• dental and vision cover
• 16 weeks of paid parental leave
• home office and internet reimbursement
• tuition support