Senior Software Engineer (Mission Optimization)

• The Mission Optimization team is responsible for continuously improving the operations and productivity of the world’s largest Earth observation satellite constellation. We identify, triage, and resolve the bottlenecks that limit what our fleets can deliver – from contact scheduling and downlink latency, to collection capacity, to concepts of operation for our future missions
• As a Senior Software Engineer on this team you will own optimization initiatives end to end: framing an ambiguous operational problem with data, designing the solution, and driving it into production
• You’ll work closely with spacecraft and systems engineering groups to understand what our current and future fleets are actually capable of, with the 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 those boundaries as you are at writing the code is a core part of this job
• This is a full-time, hybrid role which will require you to work from our San Francisco office 3 days per week
• Own significant optimization initiatives end to end – problem definition, data analysis, solution design, implementation, and measurement of the outcome against fleet SLAs and KPIs
• Design, develop, and maintain mission-critical software that schedules and optimizes activities across our satellite constellations
• Define concepts of operations for current fleets and for 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 previously missed, 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 position requires access to export-controlled information, and as such, employment (or hiring of a contractor) is contingent upon the candidate’s ability to access all applicable export-controlled information without additional export licensing being required by the Bureau of Industry and Security and/or the Directorate of Defense Trade Controls

Benefits

• Comprehensive health plan
• Wellness program and massages
• Flexible time off
• Recognition programs
• Commuter benefits
• Learning and tuition reimbursement
• Parental leave
• Offsites and happy hours
• Volunteering benefits- Effective written and verbal communication with technical and non-technical audiences
• Experience mentoring or technically leading other engineers
• Deep proficiency in Python or a comparable language, with a track record of designing and shipping systems that other people depend on
• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, or equivalent depth achieved through your work
• Data-driven approach, including statistical analysis and reasoning over large operational datasets
• Ability to take an ambiguous, loosely scoped problem and drive it to a measurable outcome with minimal direction
• Bachelor’s degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field
• 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- Planet embraces Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools, and we encourage its responsible use. We understand that candidates may use various resources, including AI tools, to prepare for interviews and assessments. However, during any live interview stage or when actively completing assessments for this position, the use of AI tools—e.g. Large Language Models (LLMs), deep fake technology, etc.—is strictly prohibited unless explicitly prompted by an interviewer or assessment instructions