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Salary: USD 162,600 - 203,200 / annual
Planet designs, builds, and operates the largest constellation of imaging satellites in history, delivering empirical Earth observation 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.
The Mission Optimization team is responsible for continuously improving the operations and productivity of the world's largest Earth observation satellite constellation. The team identifies, triages, and resolves bottlenecks that limit fleet delivery—from contact scheduling and downlink latency to collection capacity and concepts of operation for future missions.
As a Senior Software Engineer on this team, you will own optimization initiatives end to end: framing ambiguous operational problems with data, designing solutions, and driving them into production. You'll work closely with spacecraft and systems engineering groups to understand current and future fleet capabilities, with software and operations teams who build and run the systems you're changing, and with Product to stay anchored to customer commitments and SLA risk. Being as effective at building agreement across organizational boundaries as you are at writing code is a core part of this role.
Key responsibilities include:
- Own significant optimization initiatives end to end—problem definition, data analysis, solution design, implementation, and measurement of outcomes against fleet SLAs and KPIs
- Design, develop, and maintain mission-critical software that schedules and optimizes activities across satellite constellations
- Define concepts of operations for current fleets and new missions and customer use cases, working directly with spacecraft, imaging, and systems engineering teams
- Analyze operational data across the full stack to surface inefficiencies and make the case for addressing them
- Act as a technical advisor within the team and mentor earlier-career engineers
- Represent the team's technical position with stakeholders across engineering, operations, and product
This is a full-time, hybrid role requiring 3 days per week in the San Francisco office.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, or equivalent depth
- Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field
- Deep proficiency in Python or a comparable language, with a track record of designing and shipping systems that other people depend on
- Ability to take an ambiguous, loosely scoped problem and drive it to a measurable outcome with minimal direction
- Data-driven approach, including statistical analysis and reasoning over large operational datasets
- Effective written and verbal communication with technical and non-technical audiences
- Experience mentoring or technically leading other engineers
DESIRABLE QUALIFICATIONS:
- Familiarity with satellite engineering, orbital mechanics, or the space environment and its operational constraints
- Hands-on experience operating spacecraft or other remote/autonomous systems
- Experience defining concepts of operations for complex systems
- Background in optimization, scheduling, or operations research (constraint solvers, heuristics, combinatorial optimization)
- Experience with DevOps tooling and practices (Git, GitLab, Docker, CI/CD, Linux, Sentry, Datadog)
- Contributions to open-source software
Note: This position requires access to export-controlled information and is contingent upon the candidate's ability to access applicable export-controlled information without additional export licensing.
