Senior Software Engineer, Storage Infrastructure

Planet is a space and data company that designs, builds, and operates a large constellation of imaging satellites and cloud-based data platform. The Senior Software Engineer will evolve the core storage platform, working across object storage, metadata indexing, event notification, and disaster recovery while supporting highly scalable backend systems. The role also includes technical advising, project leadership, roadmap development, design reviews, and operational ownership.

Responsibilities:

• 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

Requirements:

• • 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
• • 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