Senior DevOps Engineer - Constellation as a Service Platform

Planet designs, builds, and operates the largest constellation of imaging satellites in history. This constellation delivers an unprecedented dataset of empirical information via a revolutionary cloud-based platform to authoritative figures in commercial, environmental, and humanitarian sectors. We are both a space company and data company rolled into one.

In this role, you will join Planet's Direct Access Service Infrastructure team , directly contributing to our next-generation Constellation as a Service platform . This platform represents a major new offering to our customers that goes beyond traditional cloud-based platforms and supports on-premises deployments.

You will be responsible for building, deploying, and operating critical compute software that supports end-to-end imaging operations within customer on-premises and/or cloud environments. You will use your understanding of internal compute requirements as well as customers' environmental-specific constraints to help design, implement, and support a robust system for reproducible deployments across operating environments, to guarantee the reliability, scalability, and availability of our services. To do this, you will partner closely with cross-functional engineering teams to enable and empower the integration of software solutions and the troubleshooting of distributed systems.

This is a full-time, remote position based in the United States or Canada . If located near an office, you are expected to work from that office 3 days per week .

Impact You'll Own:

• Build and deploy computing services and infrastructure in customer environments for a next-generation satellite operations and image processing end-to-end platform
• Operate in a high-impact, tight knit team to architect novel systems for air-gapped deployments at scale
• Clarify and surface requirements from ambiguous use cases defined by cross-functional stakeholders, including internal users and external customers
• Responsible for operations such as deployments, service orchestration, and documentation for cross platform stakeholders
• Scale architecture while ensuring availability of services
• Improve reliability and scalability by resolving edge cases, studying failure modes, and writing tests
• Participate in on-call rotations to ensure operational excellence

What You Bring:

• 6+ years of experience building services that leverage cloud-native infrastructure and tooling
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or similar
• Experience deploying and maintaining bare-metal and cloud Kubernetes through tools such as Talos, RKE2, Proxmox, or k3s
• Proficiency with Terraform, Ansible, Helm, Kustomize , and/or similar IaC / GitOps tooling
• Experience with CI/CD tooling , such as Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, Argo CD, or CircleCI
• Experience successfully building, releasing, and supporting highly available, consistently performant services
• Knowledge of hardware and network level implications of on-prem compute
• Experience with platform optimization, particularly resource optimization, management, and cluster tuning in a constrained environment
• Ability to observe and troubleshoot distributed systems with tools such as Alloy, Prometheus, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry
• Advanced skills in Python, Bash , and other tooling as appropriate to build services and meet product goals
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to work through collaboration with cross-functional engineering teams
• Experience working with Jira for task management and progress tracking

What Makes You Stand Out:

• Experience with CUDA-based GPU programs
• Security expertise in sensitive environments, including implementing zero-trust architectures , hardening Kubernetes clusters , conducting security audits, and deploying workloads in air-gapped environments