Backend Infrastructure Developer

Space & Data Analytics company providing open access to information about the changing planet.

Welcome to Planet Labs. We believe in using space to help life on Earth.

Looking to use your software skills for something more than ad-supported apps and e-commerce? Planet Labs aims to exponentially increase humanity's knowledge about our planet by delivering daily pictures of every place on earth. We design, build and operate the largest constellation of earth imaging satellites - all in our San Francisco office. Our mission is to democratize how people use, analyze and gain insight from information about our planet. We control every component of hardware design and manufacturing, so our office is a truly inspiring mix of experts from a variety of domains.

We have a people-centric approach toward culture and community and we are iterating in a way that puts our team members first and prepares our company for growth. Be a part of our mission and help build a company that is changing the world. We are currently seeking Backend Software Engineers to join our team.

Software touches every corner of our company, enabling us to continually improve every process by controlling the tools that run them. In addition to our internal tools that control the manufacturing, testing, operating and optimizing the satellites we also run a massive data processing pipeline that crunches terabytes of imagery (and will soon do that every single day). We run a cloud-first, API-driven architecture. Our goal is to enable everyone in the world to access our imagery, so huge web-scalability is a requirement. Our ‘full stack’ runs from the spacecraft to our web tools, and there are enough hard and interesting problems to keep many teams busy for a long time to come.

Our Backend Software engineers currently code primarily in C and Python. We run tens of thousands of jobs per day on an AWS infrastructure with PostgreSQL, Flask and ElasticSearch. Our applications are built on a foundation of open source projects. We work to be active contributors of those projects and dedicated stewards of new open source image processing and infrastructure projects.

The Must Haves:

• Expert level full-stack software development experience.
• Fluency in a variety of languages, including real world experience with Python and/or C.
• Stellar software engineering principles in design and implementation
• Experience working as part of a distributed team.
• History of taking software projects from inception to production.
• Comfortable taking the lead on projects and working without lots of oversight
• Experience maintaining and improving existing software, including testing and refactoring
• BS/MS Computer Science or equivalent professional experience

The Nice-to-Haves:

• History of open source contributions / leadership
• History of successful projects working with AWS, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, and Flask
• Git, Vagrant, Ansible and Linux usage
• Experience with REST API design
• Background in the geospatial world - PostGIS, Web Map Services, etc.