Senior Software Engineer, Storage Infrastructure

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.

This is a full-time, remote position based in the United States. If located near an office, you are expected to work from that office 3 days per week.

- 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

- 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

- 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