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.
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 Google Cloud Platform
- Experience working with geospatial data before, even tangentially
Benefits While Working at Planet:
- 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
Compensation:
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.