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Salary: USD 180,700 - 225,900 / annual
Planet designs, builds, and operates the largest constellation of imaging satellites in history, delivering empirical data via a cloud-based platform to commercial, environmental, and humanitarian sectors. The company controls every component of hardware design, manufacturing, data processing, and software engineering.
As Director of Software Engineering, Analytics, you will lead, staff, and scale the engineering organization that builds Planet's analytics—the models and pipelines that transform daily satellite imagery into actionable intelligence about site changes, port activity, and construction across regions. These analytics power dual-use products including Global Monitoring Service (GMS) and Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA) for defense use cases, with expansion into commercial and civil government applications.
You will lead engineering managers and engineers across Denver, Washington DC, remote North America, and Europe, reporting to the VP of Technology. This is a build role: the organization is transitioning from hand-built detectors to foundation-model-based methods, scaling from hundreds to thousands of monitored sites, and operating across classified and unclassified environments.
Key responsibilities include:
- Developing and executing talent strategy to support product roadmap; building staffing plans and recruiting talent; managing performance and building organizational depth
- Converting program commitments into dated, owned work with clear status reporting; owning the analytics interface with GMS and MDA application teams; delivering against shared quality and latency targets
- Defining and executing strategy for developing models serving both classified and unclassified environments while maintaining dual-use capability
- Building strategy for evolving existing analytics portfolio to leverage latest foundation model developments
- Understanding pipeline costs per site and per square kilometer; planning for ten-times scale-up implied by contract growth
The role is full-time and hybrid, requiring 3 days per week in Denver or Washington DC office. US person status and ability to obtain and hold a US government security clearance are required.
Requirements:
- 8+ years in software or machine learning engineering, with focus on computer vision, geospatial analytics, or high-scale data systems
- 6+ years leading engineering teams, including direct experience managing engineering managers and growing organization through scaling step
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, Data Science, or related technical field (or equivalent practical experience)
- Track record of shipping machine learning, computer vision, or geospatial analytics into production and owning results
- Direct experience leading engineering work governed by ITAR and EAR, with cleared and uncleared staff on same team
- Success pairing with solid technical lead or architect who owned technical direction while you owned people, plan, and delivery
- Ability to write clear plans and status reports; drive delivery against dated commitments
- Defense or intelligence customer exposure, including direct work with operators and analysts
- US person status and active US government security clearance, or eligibility to obtain one upon hire (TS/SCI preferred)
Desirable qualifications:
- Master's degree or Ph.D. in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Remote Sensing, or related discipline
- Experience leading computer vision team through shift from task-specific models to foundation models or embeddings
- Experience delivering analytics into classified, air-gapped, or sovereign cloud environments (AWS GovCloud/C2S) and understanding failure modes
- Experience integrating acquired team or merging engineering groups
- Domain knowledge in Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), maritime, or activity-based intelligence
