Site Reliability Engineer

Planet•San Francisco, CA

5d•$144,500 - $180,600•Hybrid

About The Position

Planet is hiring a Site Reliability Engineer for its Direct Access Service Infrastructure team. The role contributes to Planet’s next-generation Constellation as a Service platform, which supports on-premises deployments in addition to traditional cloud-based services. The engineer will build, deploy, and operate critical compute software supporting end-to-end imaging operations in customer on-premises and/or cloud environments. The role involves designing, implementing, and supporting robust, reproducible deployments across operating environments while accounting for internal compute needs and customer-specific constraints. The engineer will work with cross-functional engineering teams to integrate software solutions and troubleshoot distributed systems, with a focus on service reliability, scalability, and availability. This is a full-time hybrid role requiring work from Planet’s San Francisco office three days per week.

Requirements

At least 4 years of experience building services that leverage cloud-native infrastructure and tooling.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a similar field.
Experience deploying and maintaining bare-metal and cloud Kubernetes using tools such as Talos, RKE2, Proxmox, or k3s.
Proficiency with Terraform, Ansible, Helm, Kustomize, and/or similar infrastructure-as-code or GitOps tooling.
Experience with CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, Argo CD, or CircleCI.
Experience building, releasing, and supporting highly available, consistently performant services.
Knowledge of hardware- and network-level implications of on-premises computing.
Experience optimizing platforms, particularly resource optimization, management, and cluster tuning in constrained environments.
Ability to observe and troubleshoot distributed systems with tools such as Alloy, Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry.
Advanced skills in Python, Bash, and other tools as appropriate to build services and meet product goals.
Excellent communication skills and ability to collaborate with cross-functional engineering teams.
Experience using Jira for task management and progress tracking.
Ability to access applicable export-controlled information without additional export licensing, as employment is contingent on meeting this requirement.

Nice To Haves

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 computing services and infrastructure in customer environments for a next-generation satellite operations and image-processing platform.
Help architect systems for large-scale, air-gapped deployments as part of a high-impact team.
Clarify and surface requirements arising from ambiguous use cases defined by internal and external stakeholders.
Manage deployments, service orchestration, and documentation for cross-platform stakeholders.
Scale architecture while ensuring service availability.
Improve reliability and scalability by resolving edge cases, studying failure modes, and writing tests.
Participate in on-call rotations to support operational excellence.
Collaborate with cross-functional engineering teams to integrate software solutions and troubleshoot distributed systems.