Senior Software Engineer, Storage Infrastructure
About The Position
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. We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to help evolve this platform. You'll work across the stack — from object storage and metadata indexing to event notification and disaster recovery — on systems that operate at massive scale. The ideal candidate works independently, takes ownership of technical direction, has experience building large-scale backend systems, and strengthens the team through engineering judgment and collaboration.
Requirements
- 10+ years of software engineering experience of which:
- 6+ years of Go development experience building production backend services
- 6+ years of Python development experience building customer-facing 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 driving architectural decisions and guiding technical trade-offs across a team
- Experience supporting the growth of engineers around you through collaboration and knowledge sharing
- Ability to lead system design conversations for distributed backend services
Nice To Haves
- 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
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
- Shape technical approach and system design for the team's high-impact projects
- Help engineers on the team grow through code reviews, pairing, and design discussions
- 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
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
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
