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Planet is seeking a Vice President of Defense and Intelligence Solutions Engineering to lead and scale the software engineering organization responsible for building end-to-end dual-use products and applications. The company operates the world's largest constellation of imaging satellites, delivering geospatial data and analytics to commercial, environmental, and humanitarian sectors.
In this executive role, you will lead multi-disciplinary engineering teams across software, architecture, AI/ML, analytics, and forward-deployed engineering. You will own the technical architecture, systems development, and operational delivery of flagship dual-use products including Global Monitoring Service (GMS), Marine Domain Awareness (MDA), automated change detection feeds, and agentic workflows. You will partner directly with Product Management, Core Platform Engineering, and Executive Leadership to transform raw satellite imagery and API services into scalable, mission-critical software solutions.
Key responsibilities include leading and mentoring multi-disciplinary software engineering teams; defining software architecture and technical standards for high-throughput geospatial analytics and real-time alerting platforms; overseeing ITAR and EAR compliance across engineering development and deployment pipelines; translating market vision and defense mission requirements into scalable engineering roadmaps; directing integration of advanced ML models and agentic workflows; and driving software engineering metrics, system reliability, and secure cloud deployment architectures.
You bring 15+ years of software engineering and systems architecture experience, with focus on high-scale data, computer vision, or geospatial applications. You have 8+ years of direct experience leading and scaling multi-disciplinary engineering organizations. You have managed teams and pipelines governed by ITAR/EAR regulations, architected end-to-end dual-use or defense software applications at scale, and possess deep technical expertise in distributed cloud architectures, high-throughput data processing, APIs, and ML integration. An active high-level government security clearance or demonstrated eligibility for top-secret clearance is required. Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, Data Science, or related field (or equivalent experience) required.
This is a full-time, hybrid role requiring 3 days per week in either the San Francisco or Washington DC office.
