Senior Software Engineer, Storage Infrastructure

Planet; United States; On-site; USD 143,000 - 179,000; Full time

Job summary

Planet is seeking a senior software engineer to join the Storage team. You will help build and expand the core object and metadata storage platform that underpins our data infrastructure, ensuring scalable, reliable access to petabytes of imagery and associated datasets.

This full-time, remote role is based in the United States or Canada; if you are near an office, you may work from it three days a week. You will own services, drive optimization, and participate in design reviews.

Qualifications

• 6–8 years of software engineering experience.
• Proficient in Go or Python for production backend services.
• Experience with cloud-native architectures and monitoring.
• Familiarity with relational and non-relational datastores.
• Strong communication and remote-work skills.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain scalable data storage and access systems.
• Improve internal search and image processing services.
• Tune Elasticsearch indexing and performance.
• Operate on-call and incident response.
• Contribute to architectural roadmaps and design reviews.
• Mentor engineers and lead project teams.

Skills

Go development

Python development

Cloud-native software

Distributed backend services

AI-assisted development tools

Tools

Kubernetes

Terraform

AWS

GCP

PostgreSQL

MySQL

Elasticsearch

Job description

Welcome to Planet. We believe in using space to help life on Earth. Planet designs, builds, and operates the largest constellation of imaging satellites in history. This constellation delivers an unprecedented dataset of empirical information via a revolutionary cloud-based platform to authoritative figures in commercial, environmental, and humanitarian sectors. We are both a space company and data company all rolled into one. Customers and users across the globe use Planet's data to develop new technologies, drive revenue, power research, and solve our world’s toughest obstacles. As we control every component of hardware design, manufacturing, data processing, and software engineering, our office is a truly inspiring mix of experts from a variety of domains. We have a people-centric approach toward culture and community and we strive to iterate in a way that puts our team members first and prepares our company for growth. Join Planet and be a part of our mission to change the way people see the world. Planet is a global company with employees working remotely world wide and joining us from offices in San Francisco, Washington DC, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, and The Netherlands.

About The Role

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.

This is a full-time, remote position based in the United States or Canada. If located near an office, you are expected to work from that office 3 days per week.

Impact You'll Own

• 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

What You Bring

• 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

What Makes You Stand Out

• 6+ years of Go development experience building production backend services
• 6+ years of Python development experience building customer-facing APIs
• Experience maintaining infrastructure with Kubernetes and Terraform
• Experience building services that leverage cloud-based infrastructure and tooling such as AWS or GCP
• Experience working with geospatial data before, even tangentially

$142,800—$178,500 USD

Planet is committed to building a community where everyone belongs and we invite people from all backgrounds to apply. Planet is an equal opportunity employer, and committed to providing employment opportunities regardless of race, religious creed, color, national origin, ancestry, physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding, age, sexual orientation, military or veteran status, or any other protected classification, in accordance with applicable federal, state, and local laws. Know Your Rights.