Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Planet designs, builds, and operates a large constellation of imaging satellites and delivers satellite imagery through a cloud-based platform. The Senior Site Reliability Engineer will build, deploy, and operate critical compute software for satellite imaging operations across customer on-premises and cloud environments, while ensuring reliable, scalable, and highly available services. The role also involves designing reproducible deployments, troubleshooting distributed systems, and collaborating with cross-functional engineering teams.

Responsibilities:

• Build and deploy computing services and infrastructure in customer environments for a next-generation satellite operations and image processing end-to-end platform
• Operate in a high-impact, tight knit team to architect novel systems for air-gapped deployments at scale
• Clarify and surface requirements from ambiguous use cases defined by cross-functional stakeholders, including internal users and external customers
• Responsible for operations such as deployments, service orchestration, and documentation for cross platform stakeholders
• Scale architecture while ensuring availability of services
• Improve reliability and scalability by resolving edge cases, studying failure modes, and writing tests
• Participate in on-call rotations to ensure operational excellence

Requirements:

• 6+ years of experience building services that leverage cloud-native infrastructure and tooling
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or similar
• Experience deploying and maintaining bare-metal and cloud kubernetes through tools such as Talos, RKE2, Proxmox, or k3s
• Proficiency with Terraform, Ansible, Helm, Kustomize, and/or similar IaC / GitOps tooling
• Experience with CI/CD tooling, such as Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, Argo CD, or CircleCI
• Experience successfully building, releasing, and supporting highly available, consistently performant services
• Knowledge of hardware and network level implications of on-prem compute
• Experience with platform optimization, particularly resource optimization, management, and cluster tuning in a constrained environment
• Ability to observe and troubleshoot distributed systems with tools such as Alloy, Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry
• Advanced skills in Python, Bash, and other tooling as appropriate to build services and meet product goals
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to work through collaboration with cross-functional engineering teams
• Experience working with Jira for task management and progress tracking
• 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
• This position requires access to export-controlled information, and as such, employment (or hiring of a contractor) is contingent upon the candidate's ability to access all applicable export-controlled information without additional export licensing being required by the Bureau of Industry and Security and/or the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls
• Experience with CUDA-based GPU programs
• Security expertise in sensitive environments, including implementing zero-trust architectures, hardening Kubernetes clusters, conducting security audits, and deploying workloads in air-gapped environments