Software Engineer, Compute Team

About the Role

Planet's satellite constellations image the world's surface every day, delivering raw images through hundreds of workflows to provide processed imagery, analysis, and insights to our customers. The Compute Team develops and operates the in-house distributed systems that ensure these workflows are reliably executed at vast scale 24x7. These systems enable new techniques to understand our changing world, especially as AI models enable a wider range of analyses. You will be responsible for the development and operation of these backend services using a tech stack consisting of Go, Python, and Kubernetes running on Google’s Cloud. Ideal candidates are pragmatic software engineers who apply sound engineering principles and operational discipline to large backend data services.

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 You'll Own

• Spearheads the evolution of compute and data delivery services with an emphasis on scale and user requirements
• Collaborates to enable efficient and rapid access to our variety of new and growing data sets
• Improves reliability and scalability by resolving edge cases, studying failure modes, and writing tests
• Manages underlying persistence layers across Spanner, Redis, PostgreSQL and BigTable
• Owns the operation of these services by measuring performance, creating alerts, runbooks, and responding to incidents and performance anomalies
• Participates in an on-call rotation in support of our team’s services

What You Bring

• 4+ years of relevant work experience building services in a language like Go or Python, and a clear interest in becoming an expert in both.
• Experience of cloud-native development - containerization, cloud services such as GCP/AWS
• Experience with a large shared codebase, continuous integration and deployment workflows, and tooling like GitLab CI
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills, written and oral; can explain deeply technical topics to teammates and users

What Makes You Stand Out

• Experience with orchestration workflows (e.g., Temporal) and batch/queue processing for high-concurrency systems.
• Expertise in large-scale distributed systems, including data consistency tradeoffs and high-volume networking (e.g., Nginx/Envoy).
• Operational proficiency with Kubernetes, Terraform, ArgoCD, Crossplane, and Linux internals.