Application Guide
How to Apply for Senior Software Engineer, Storage Infrastructure
at Planet
🏢 About Planet
Planet operates the largest constellation of Earth-imaging satellites, capturing daily imagery of the entire planet. This unique data enables unprecedented environmental monitoring, agriculture optimization, and disaster response, making it a mission-driven company at the intersection of space tech and data science.
About This Role
As a Senior Software Engineer on the Storage Infrastructure team, you will design and maintain systems that handle petabytes of satellite imagery and derived data. Your work directly enables scientists, businesses, and governments to access critical insights from real-time Earth observation data.
💡 A Day in the Life
Your morning might start by reviewing alerts from overnight and triaging any issues with the Elasticsearch cluster. You'll then spend the afternoon designing a new index strategy for a growing dataset, collaborating with data scientists on query patterns, and writing Go code to optimize data ingestion pipelines. The day ends with a team standup and a code review for a new storage service.
🚀 Application Tools
🎯 Who Planet Is Looking For
- Has 10+ years of software engineering experience, with deep expertise in Go and Python for building production-grade backend services.
- Proven track record of operating highly scalable cloud-native systems (AWS/GCP) and managing both relational (PostgreSQL) and non-relational (Elasticsearch, BigTable) datastores.
- Experienced in full service ownership: monitoring, alerting, on-call, and incident response for high-availability systems.
- Comfortable tuning and scaling Elasticsearch for large-scale indexing and search workloads, especially for geospatial or time-series data.
📝 Tips for Applying to Planet
Highlight specific projects where you built or scaled storage systems handling petabytes of data, especially with Go and Python.
Quantify your impact: e.g., 'Reduced query latency by 40% by optimizing Elasticsearch sharding strategy.'
Emphasize experience with on-call rotations and incident response for cloud-native services.
Mention any familiarity with geospatial data formats (e.g., GeoTIFF, STAC) or satellite imagery processing pipelines.
Tailor your resume to show deep Elasticsearch expertise, including cluster tuning, index lifecycle management, and performance optimization.
✉️ What to Emphasize in Your Cover Letter
["Passion for Planet's mission of using satellite data for environmental stewardship and sustainability.", 'Deep technical expertise in Go, Python, and Elasticsearch for large-scale storage and indexing.', 'Proven ability to own services end-to-end, from design to on-call support.', 'Specific examples of scaling storage infrastructure to handle growing datasets with high reliability.']
Generate Cover Letter →🔍 Research Before Applying
To stand out, make sure you've researched:
- → Explore Planet's product offerings: PlanetScope, SkySat, and their APIs to understand data access patterns.
- → Read Planet's engineering blog for posts on infrastructure and data pipelines.
- → Familiarize yourself with the STAC (SpatioTemporal Asset Catalog) specification used in geospatial data.
- → Check recent news about Planet's partnerships or satellite launches to understand company growth.
💬 Prepare for These Interview Topics
Based on this role, you may be asked about:
⚠️ Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Ignoring the on-call responsibility; failing to mention your experience with incident response or pager duty.
- Being vague about your role in scaling systems; always quantify your impact.
- Not demonstrating deep knowledge of Elasticsearch; this role specifically requires tuning and operating it.
📅 Application Timeline
This position is open until filled. However, we recommend applying as soon as possible as roles at mission-driven organizations tend to fill quickly.
Typical hiring timeline:
Application Review
1-2 weeks
Initial Screening
Phone call or written assessment
Interviews
1-2 rounds, usually virtual
Offer
Congratulations!