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Planet is seeking a Vice President of Defense and Intelligence Solutions Engineering to lead the software engineering organization responsible for building end-to-end dual-use products and applications. You will own the technical architecture, systems development, and operational delivery of flagship products including Global Monitoring Service (GMS), Marine Domain Awareness (MDA), automated change detection feeds, and agentic workflows.
In this executive role, you will lead multi-disciplinary teams spanning software, architecture, AI/ML, analytics, and forward-deployed engineering. You will partner directly with Product Management, Core Platform Engineering, and Executive Leadership to transform satellite imagery and API services into scalable, mission-critical software solutions. Key responsibilities include overseeing system availability, performance SLAs, and ITAR-compliant deployment pipelines, serving as the senior engineering authority for Planet's defense and intelligence software portfolio.
You will lead, mentor, and scale multi-disciplinary software engineering teams tasked with building and maintaining end-to-end dual-use products. You will define software architecture, data models, and technical standards required to deliver high-throughput geospatial analytics, real-time alerting, and automated detection platforms at scale. You will oversee engineering development standards and deployment pipelines to ensure full technical compliance with ITAR and EAR regulations. Additionally, you will partner with Product Management to translate market vision and defense mission requirements into scalable engineering roadmaps, direct the technical integration of advanced machine learning models and agentic workflows, and drive software engineering metrics, system reliability, and secure cloud deployment architectures.
Required qualifications include 15+ years of software engineering and systems architecture experience with focus on high-scale data, computer vision, or geospatial applications; 8+ years leading and scaling multi-disciplinary engineering organizations; direct experience managing teams and pipelines governed by ITAR/EAR; demonstrated track record architecting and operating dual-use or defense software applications at scale; active high-level government security clearance or demonstrated eligibility for top-secret clearance; deep technical expertise in distributed cloud architectures, high-throughput data processing, API infrastructure, and ML integration; and a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field.
This is a full-time, hybrid role requiring 3 days per week in either the San Francisco or Washington DC office.
