Edge Compute Engineer

Planet

97d • $142,800 - $203,000

About The Position

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 rolled into one. In this role, you will join Planet's High Resolution team, directly contributing to our next-generation Constellation Service platform. You will be responsible for building, deploying, and operating critical compute software that supports end-to-end imaging operations within customer environments. You will use your understanding of internal compute requirements as well as customers' environmental-specific constraints to help design and implement a robust system for reproducible deployments across operating environments, to guarantee the reliability, scalability, and availability of our services. To do this, you will partner closely with cross-functional engineering teams to enable and empower the integration of software solutions and the troubleshooting of distributed systems. Ideal candidates will have a passion for programming, photography, remote sensing, earth sciences and geography, with a willingness to learn about geospatial data and concepts.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or similar
• 6+ years of experience building services that leverage cloud-native infrastructure and tooling
• Experience deploying and maintaining bare-metal K8s through tools such as K3s, RKE2, TalOS
• Proficient with Terraform, Ansible, Helm, Kustomize, and/or similar IaC / GitOps tooling
• Experience successfully building, releasing, and supporting highly available, consistently performant services
• Knowledge of hardware-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 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

Nice To Haves

• Experience working with geospatial data and concepts
• Exposure to geospatial raster data processing with tools such as GDAL and NumPy
• 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

Responsibilities

• Build and deploy software in customer environments for a next-generation imagery processing system
• Own 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
• Collaborate cross-functionally with Product, Engineering Management, and engineering teams on system design and roadmapping for scalable and robust solutions.

Benefits

• 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

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Mid Level
• Education Level: Bachelor's degree
• Number of Employees: 501-1,000 employees