Site Reliability Engineer

Planet•San Francisco, CA

2d•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 customer on-premises deployments as well as cloud environments. The engineer will build, deploy, and operate critical compute software supporting end-to-end satellite imaging operations. The position involves designing and supporting robust, reproducible deployments across operating environments, accounting for internal compute needs and customer-specific constraints. The engineer will work with cross-functional teams to integrate software solutions and troubleshoot distributed systems, while ensuring service reliability, scalability, and availability. This is a full-time hybrid role requiring work from Planet’s San Francisco office three days per week, including participation in on-call rotations.

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, 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 with platform optimization, including resource optimization, management, and cluster tuning in constrained environments.
Ability to observe and troubleshoot distributed systems using 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 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 requiring additional export licensing.

Nice To Haves

Experience with CUDA-based GPU programs.
Security expertise in sensitive environments, including zero-trust architecture implementation, Kubernetes cluster hardening, security audits, and deploying workloads in air-gapped environments.

Responsibilities

Build and deploy computing services and infrastructure in customer environments for a satellite operations and image-processing platform.
Help architect systems for large-scale air-gapped deployments.
Clarify requirements from ambiguous use cases involving internal stakeholders and external customers.
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.
Partner with cross-functional engineering teams to integrate software solutions and troubleshoot distributed systems.

Benefits

Medical, dental, and vision plans.
Health Savings Account with a company contribution.
Paid time off, holidays, and company-wide days off.
16 weeks of paid parental leave.
Wellness Program and Employee Assistance Program.
Home office reimbursement.
Monthly phone and internet reimbursement.
Tuition reimbursement and access to LinkedIn Learning.
Equity.
Commuter benefits for employees local to an office.
Paid volunteer time off.
Possible discretionary short-term and long-term incentives, including bonus and equity.