Senior Software Engineer, Storage Infrastructure
About this role
Engineers on the Storage team spend their days building and expanding the core object and metadata storage platform that underpins Planet's data infrastructure, handling data lifecycle, indexing, and search operations at scale. You will work across the stack on complex systems ranging from object storage to event notification and disaster recovery for petabytes of satellite imagery. The role exists to evolve horizontally scalable storage architectures that enable other teams to focus on their core domains while ensuring data remains reliable and accessible for climate monitoring and disaster response.
Candidates who do well here bring specialized depth in distributed backend services and act as technical advisors to peers. You should be comfortable taking full service ownership, tuning Elasticsearch indexing, and collaborating effectively within a distributed remote team. A strong alignment with cloud-native infrastructure and a systematic approach to engineering challenges will help you succeed.
What you will do
- 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.
- Take full service ownership by measuring performance, creating alerts, participating in the on-call rotation, and responding to incidents.
- Determine methods and procedures on new assignments while evaluating variable factors to deliver complex solutions.
- 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.
What you need
- Bring 6 to 8 years of software engineering experience building production backend services and APIs.
- Demonstrated development capability in Go, Python, or similar modern languages.
- Utilize AI-assisted development tools such as Claude or Copilot as part of the daily engineering workflow.
- Monitor and operate highly scalable cloud-native software.
- Understand relational datastores like PostgreSQL or MySQL alongside non-relational alternatives like BigTable and Elasticsearch.
- Build, release, and support highly available, consistently performant services.
- Communicate effectively and work well in a remote setting.
Nice to have
- 6+ years of Go development experience building production backend services
- 6+ years of Python development experience building customer-facing APIs
- 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
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
- Home Office Reimbursement
- Monthly Phone and Internet Reimbursement
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
What is the remote work policy for this role?
This is a full-time, remote position based in the United States or Canada. If located near an office, you are expected to work from that office 3 days per week.
What is the salary range for the position?
The US base salary range for this full-time position at the commencement of employment is $142,800 to $178,500 USD. The final salary range is determined by job related experience, skills, and location.
What tools and languages will I be using?
You will build production backend services using modern languages like Go or Python. The tech stack also involves operating and tuning Elasticsearch indexing, working with relational and non-relational datastores, and utilizing AI-assisted development tools.
How are applications reviewed?
Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis, and the posting may be removed earlier than projected if a suitable pool of applications has been received.