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About the Role

Planet's mission is to image the entire world every day, making global change visible, accessible, and actionable. We are building a new product group focused on launching an AI Geospatial Assistant that transforms how customers interact with global imagery to solve high-stakes problems. The Senior Engineering Manager will lead a high-velocity squad of engineers, transitioning geospatial AI capabilities into a robust, market-ready product, focusing on operational excellence, defining success thresholds, managing scope, and ensuring bleeding-edge tech graduates into a dependable tool. This role requires a leader who is personally AI-native and pioneers a culture where AI is a core collaborator.

Responsibilities

Build a High-Density Talent Engine: Responsible for the full talent lifecycle—from sourcing and hiring the initial founding squad to designing an onboarding experience.
Establish a Culture of Extreme Ownership: Foster an environment where engineers own customer outcomes rather than just technical tasks.
Team Operations: Design and iterate on the team’s "operating system" (e.g., sprint cadences, RFC processes, and automated testing) to ensure the shift from research to product is supported by rigorous engineering discipline.
Collaborate with AI Researchers: Work closely with the AI Research Team to understand their models, workflows, and emerging capabilities, then guide the team in translating research into production ready systems.
Establish Evaluation-Led Development: Ensure the team builds "Evals" (automated benchmarks) before they build features, ensuring that we measure improvement velocity rather than just raw output.
Career Architecture & Mentorship: Actively coach and mentor a diverse group of engineers, navigating their career paths and maintaining high levels of psychological safety and engagement.
Strategic Roadmapping & De-risking: Partner with Product and Design to translate the ai.planet.com vision into a realistic technical roadmap, identifying "long-pole" technical risks early.
Cross-Functional Leadership: Act as a "board of directors" member alongside Product and Design partners, ensuring engineering efforts are laser-focused on forensics and change-detection use cases.

Requirements

6+ years of relevant experience
4+ years of experience leading software engineering teams
Track record of hiring and leading founding engineering teams in a startup or high-growth "intrapreneurial" environment.
Personally AI-native: writes production code with AI tools, has strong opinions on how AI is changing the engineering SDLC, and is prepared to build a culture where AI is a core collaborator, not a compliance consideration
Experience and enthusiasm for leading AI engineering teams that have successfully elevated research prototypes into production-grade applications.
Expert in the "human element" of engineering—managing conflict, delivering difficult feedback, and keeping a team motivated through the inevitable pivots of an early-stage product.
Ability to identify "process bugs" (why a team is slowing down) and implement the cultural or structural changes needed to restore velocity.
Technical Breadth: Ability to synthesize input from AI researchers and frontend experts to make sound architectural and personnel decisions.
Pragmatic Execution: A "good enough—move on" mentality that avoids seeking perfection at the cost of delivering meaningful customer value.
Impact focused: Excited by building an application that will give researchers, journalists, governments, and NGOs the ability to explore the world using natural language and surface crucial insights.
Prior experience with LLM Observability and Monitoring: Tools and techniques for managing non-deterministic systems (e.g., LangSmith, Arize, or similar).
Public Leadership: Comfortable representing the team’s work to executive leadership and external stakeholders.
Product-First Mindset: A track record of balancing technical excellence with the urgency of market delivery and "graduation criteria".
Geospatial Context: Prior experience with geospatial data, satellite imagery, or planetary-scale analytics is highly preferred.

Skills

AI tools
Geospatial data
Planetary-scale analytics
LLM Observability and Monitoring
LangSmith
Arize

Location

San Francisco

Work Type

Full-time
Hybrid

Experience Level

Senior

Education Level

Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field

Salary/Compensations

$182,900—$228,600 USD

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

About the Company

Planet designs, builds, and operates the largest constellation of imaging satellites in history, delivering an unprecedented dataset of empirical information via a cloud-based platform.
We are both a space company and data company.
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.
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.
Planet is a global company with employees working remotely world wide and joining us from offices in San Francisco, Washington DC, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, and The Netherlands.

Equal Opportunity

Pursuant to the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records.
Planet is committed to building a community where everyone belongs and we invite people from all backgrounds to apply.
Planet is an equal opportunity employer, and committed to providing employment opportunities regardless of race, religious creed, color, national origin, ancestry, physical disability, mental disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, pregnancy, childbirth and breastfeeding, age, sexual orientation, military or veteran status, or any other protected classification, in accordance with applicable federal, state, and local laws.
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