Commercial AI Innovation Lead

Role Description

As lead for Commercial AI Innovation, you will sit at the intersection of Planet's most valuable asset — the world's largest daily Earth observation archive — and the commercial use cases that prove its economic power. You will identify where Planet's imagery, analytics, and AI infrastructure can generate leading economic signals and physical economy intelligence for commercial customers, then rapidly prototype, validate, and scale those concepts into measurable revenue impact.

This role is equal parts strategist and builder. You will partner closely with Sales, Customer Success, Product, and Data Science to translate Planet's AI-led product strategy into prioritized roadmaps and customer-ready proof points — moving fast, building proof, and finding the signal before committing full engineering resources. At a moment when Planet is expanding its next-generation constellation fleet and accelerating its analytics and intelligence offerings, this role exists to make sure the commercial organization is equipped to win the next chapter of Earth observation.

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

Impact You'll Own:

• Identify and prioritize high-value commercial use cases where Planet's imagery archive, Planet Analytic Feeds, Planetary Variables, and embeddings infrastructure generate differentiated economic signals — with emphasis on financial services, supply chain, energy, and infrastructure verticals.
• Spearhead a technology innovation pipeline from initial hypothesis through MVP validation, building demo-ready prototypes on Planet's platform well ahead of full product investment.
• Partner with Commercial Sales and Customer Success leadership to systematically convert field insight and customer conversations into structured, repeatable AI-enabled concepts.
• Provide support to translate validated prototypes into prioritized product roadmap inputs, coordinating across Product, Data Science, and Engineering to create a credible path to scale.
• Serve as a senior thought partner to Commercial leadership, framing where AI-driven differentiation is both technically achievable and commercially viable.
• Drive adoption of innovation outputs by embedding new tools and frameworks into Sales plays, Customer Success workflows, and partner programs.
• Partner with the Education and research liaison on finding new innovation opportunities in academia.
• Represent Planet's commercial AI capabilities externally with customers (particularly our largest and most strategic commercial customers), at industry forums, and with the analyst community.

Qualifications

• 10+ years spanning commercial strategy, customer-facing roles, and data or analytics product development — ideally at the intersection of geospatial, alternative data, or enterprise SaaS.
• Deep familiarity with commercial market data use cases: alternative data for financial services, supply chain analytics, physical economy signals, or adjacent domains where satellite-derived intelligence creates decision advantage.
• Ability to prototype and pitch AI-enabled concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences — you can build a compelling demo and a compelling business case, and you know which one the room needs.
• Working knowledge of the geospatial AI landscape: change detection, image classification, time-series analysis over Earth observation data, and the role of embeddings in enabling semantic query across global imagery archives.
• Track record of building momentum in ambiguous, low-resource environments.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills; experience influencing VP and C-suite stakeholders with data-backed narratives.

Requirements

• Direct experience building or selling into the alternative data ecosystem — hedge funds, commodity intelligence, physical economy indexing, or supply chain analytics.
• Hands-on experience with rapid prototyping tools and vibe coding workflows (Cursor, Streamlit, or similar) to build and validate concepts without a full engineering team.
• Familiarity with Planet's product suite and the Earth observation competitive landscape.
• Experience operating within or alongside a commercial skunkworks or innovation function inside a data or SaaS company.

Benefits

• Comprehensive Medical, Dental, and Vision plans.
• Health Savings Account (HSA) with a company contribution.
• Generous Paid Time Off in addition to holidays and company-wide days off.
• 16 Weeks of Paid Parental Leave.
• Wellness Program and Employee Assistance Program (EAP).
• Home Office Reimbursement.
• Monthly Phone and Internet Reimbursement.
• Tuition Reimbursement and access to LinkedIn Learning.
• Equity.
• Commuter Benefits (if local to an office).
• Volunteering Paid Time Off.