Application Guide

How to Apply for Site Reliability Engineer

at Planet

🏢 About Planet

Planet operates the largest constellation of imaging satellites in history, delivering daily Earth imagery to empower environmental, commercial, and humanitarian decision-making. As both a space and data company, it offers a unique blend of hardware, software, and data engineering challenges. Working here means contributing to a mission that changes how we see and care for our planet.

About This Role

As a Site Reliability Engineer at Planet, you will ensure the reliability, scalability, and performance of the cloud-based platform that processes and delivers satellite imagery to global customers. You'll work on automation, incident response, and system design to support a constellation generating unprecedented data volumes. Your work directly enables timely insights for climate monitoring, disaster response, and sustainable agriculture.

💡 A Day in the Life

A typical day might start with reviewing system dashboards and alerts from overnight, then participating in a stand-up with the distributed SRE team. You might spend the morning automating a deployment pipeline or improving monitoring for a new satellite data stream, and afternoons could involve incident response, conducting a post-mortem, or collaborating with software engineers to design a more resilient service.

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Interview Prep

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🎯 Who Planet Is Looking For

  • Expertise in cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform or Pulumi, with experience managing large-scale distributed systems.
  • Strong programming skills in Python or Go for building automation, monitoring, and tooling, with a focus on reliability and observability.
  • Experience with container orchestration (Kubernetes) and CI/CD pipelines, ideally in a data-intensive or satellite imagery context.
  • A proactive, collaborative mindset with a passion for incident response, root cause analysis, and driving reliability improvements across engineering teams.

📝 Tips for Applying to Planet

1

Highlight any experience with geospatial data processing or large-scale data pipelines, as this is core to Planet's platform.

2

Showcase specific metrics or outcomes from your SRE work (e.g., improved uptime, reduced incident response time, cost optimization).

3

Mention familiarity with satellite imagery or Earth observation technologies, even if just personal projects or coursework.

4

Tailor your resume to emphasize automation and reliability engineering over pure software development.

5

In your cover letter, connect your past work to Planet's mission of using space to help life on Earth.

✉️ What to Emphasize in Your Cover Letter

["Express genuine interest in Planet's mission to provide daily Earth imagery for environmental and humanitarian impact.", "Demonstrate your experience with large-scale, reliable systems and how you've improved uptime or performance.", 'Highlight your ability to work remotely and in a global team, as Planet has a distributed workforce.', 'Mention any experience with satellite data, geospatial tools, or similar data-intensive platforms.']

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🔍 Research Before Applying

To stand out, make sure you've researched:

  • → Read Planet's public blog posts about their infrastructure, especially on scaling and reliability challenges.
  • → Familiarize yourself with Planet's product lines (e.g., PlanetScope, SkySat) and how data is delivered to customers.
  • → Understand the basics of satellite imagery processing (orthorectification, atmospheric correction) to show domain awareness.
  • → Review Planet's engineering culture and remote work practices on their careers page or Glassdoor.

💬 Prepare for These Interview Topics

Based on this role, you may be asked about:

1 Design a highly available system for ingesting and processing satellite imagery from a constellation.
2 How would you handle a sudden spike in data volume from a new satellite? Discuss scaling strategies.
3 Describe your approach to incident response and post-mortem culture at a remote-first company.
4 Explain how you would monitor the health of a distributed system processing petabytes of data.
5 How do you balance reliability with feature velocity? Give an example from your past experience.
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⚠️ Common Mistakes to Avoid

  • Don't focus solely on software development; SRE roles require deep infrastructure and operations knowledge.
  • Avoid vague statements like 'I love space'; instead, connect your skills to specific technical challenges at Planet.
  • Don't neglect to mention experience with on-call rotations and incident management, as that's core to SRE.

📅 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:

1

Application Review

1-2 weeks

2

Initial Screening

Phone call or written assessment

3

Interviews

1-2 rounds, usually virtual

✓

Offer

Congratulations!

Ready to Apply?

Good luck with your application to Planet!

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