Director, Platform Operations

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

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 all rolled into one.

Customers and users across the globe use Planet's data to develop new technologies, drive revenue, power research, and solve our world’s toughest obstacles.

As we control every component of hardware design, manufacturing, data processing, and software engineering, 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 strive to iterate in a way that puts our team members first and prepares our company for growth. Join Planet and be a part of our mission to change the way people see the world.

Planet is headquartered in San Francisco, California, Earth.

About the Role:  

Planet is looking for an exceptional Director of Platform Operations with a proven background in hiring, mentoring, and leading high-functioning engineering teams.

As Sr. Manager/Director of Platform Operations, you will lead the engineering teams that own and operate our core platform and work to minimize friction involved in bringing Planet services to prod. Our Platform services span thousands of nodes and process terabytes of imagery data every day. You will ensure the teams properly engage across various internal stakeholders to build a wildly successful, customer-centric set of services.

You will work with your team and peers to build and execute a strategy that enables Planet’s mission with our core shared infrastructure built on Kubernetes and GCP. This will include things like observability, application delivery, container deployment, and orchestration with tools such as Kubernetes and CI/CD tooling. In the broadest sense, this team owns the set of technologies upon which we build, deploy, deliver, and operate our applications at Planet. This role is deeply cross-functional, and building positive relationships across Product, Software Engineering, and Space Systems will be crucial to your success.

Impact You’ll Own:

• Collaborate across the engineering organization to define and adopt best practices and to help to build the overall ecosystem for our system and service architecture.
• Foster a culture of innovation and customer service within the team and the organization you support.
• Work to evangelize the set of services your teams own across the engineering organizations in order to drive adoption of the architecture where required. 
• Work to establish technical standards and guidelines to ensure the integrity of our systems and compliance with company IT standards, policies and processes.
• Lead the development and evolution of a multi-year product strategy for shifting user needs across local verticals, and build execution strategies across key surfaces.
• Influence a culture of Help Bullet on operational excellence or SLOs or some such thing?
• Cultivate a culture of operational excellence within Planet by working to improve service engagements driven by SLO, SLA. 

What You Bring:

• Ability to build, retain, and grow diverse, geographically dispersed, high-performing teams.
• Experience with high-volume, highly available, scalable, distributed systems.
• Experience building large scale services on top of cloud providers like AWS and GCP. 
• Experience leading large teams and driving organizational design, career development, operations, and culture in partnership with Product Managers and Engineering teams.
• Demonstrated success in measuring and improving service engagements driven by SLO, SLA. 

What Makes You Stand Out:

• Deep experience building services on top of Google Cloud Plaform.
• Experience operating a kubernetes based service architecture across dozens of clusters in multiple regions. 

Benefits While Working at Planet:

• Comprehensive Health Plan
• Wellness program and onsite massages in specific offices
• Flexible Time Off
• Recognition Programs
• Commuter Benefits
• Learning and Tuition Reimbursement
• Parental Leave
• Offsites and Happy Hours
• Volunteering Benefits

Some Press About Us: 

Our CEO, Will Marshall featured on TED and featured in a Planet Blog

“Planet: Bringing Space Back Down to Earth”

Tiny, privately owned satellites are changing how we view the Earth features in NBC News

“Planet And Rocket Lab Create Mission Patch To Honor Women In Aerospace” —Planet Blog

Why we care so much about Belonging. 

We’re dedicated to helping the whole Planet, and to do that we must strive to represent all of it within each of our offices and on all of our teams. That’s why Planet is guided by an ultimate  north star of Belonging, dreaming big as we approach our ongoing work with diversity, equity and inclusion.  If this job intrigues you, but you’re thinking you might not have all the qualifications, please... do apply!  At Planet, we are looking for well-rounded people from around the world who can contribute to more ways than just what is listed in this job description.  We don’t just fill positions, we aspire to fulfill people’s careers, most excited about folks who are motivated by our underlying humanitarian efforts.  We are a few orbits around the sun before we get to where we want to be, so we hope you’re excited to come along for the ride.