Senior Software Engineer, Storage Infrastructure

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 Planets 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 companys 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. Planets 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.

Were looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help evolve this platform. Youll work across the stack — from object storage and metadata indexing to event notification and disaster recovery — on systems that operate at massive scale. 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.

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

Impact Youll 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

• Shape technical approach and system design for the teams 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 teams systems

• Participate in design reviews and help drive alignment on technical decisions

What You Bring:

• 10+ years of software engineering experience of which:

o 6+ years of Go development experience building production backend services

o 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

What Makes You Stand Out:

• 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

Benefits While Working at Planet:

These offerings are dependent on employment type and geographical location, based upon applicable law or company policy.

• Comprehensive Medical, Dental, and Vision plans

• Health Savings Account (HSA) with a company contribution

• Generous Paid Time Off in addition to holidays and company-wide days off 

• 16 Weeks of Paid Parental Leave

• Wellness Program and Employee Assistance Program (EAP)

• Home Office Reimbursement

• Monthly Phone and Internet Reimbursement

• Tuition Reimbursement and access to LinkedIn Learning

• Equity

• Commuter Benefits (if local to an office)

• Volunteering Paid Time Off

The US base salary range for this full-time position at the commencement of employment is listed below. Additionally, this role might be eligible for discretionary short-term and long-term incentives (bonus and equity). The final salary range is determined by job related experience, skills and location. The range displays our typical hiring range for new hire salaries in US locations only. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process.