Planet

Planet

Senior Engineering Manager - AI Geospatial Assistant Team

San Francisco, CA · Senior · Full-time

Sponsorship not specified$183k-$229kDetected 1 day ago
Full-Stack DevelopmentLLMsRoadmappingHardware DesignTest AutomationResearchLeadershipCollaborationMentoring

About the role

  • Planet's mission is to image the entire world every day, making global change visible, accessible, and actionable.
  • We are at a critical inflection point: operationalizing promising AI research into delivery-focused enterprise "productization".

Responsibilities

  • 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.
  • Work closely with our AI Research Team to understand their models, workflows, and emerging capabilities, then guide your team in translating research into production ready systems that deliver real value to users.
  • Ensure the team builds "Evals" (automated benchmarks) before they build features, ensuring that we measure improvement velocity rather than just raw output.
  • 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.
  • Establish a Culture of Extreme Ownership: Foster an environment where engineers own customer outcomes rather than just technical tasks. You will define what accountability looks like in a high-uncertainty, non-deterministic AI environment.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • 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.
  • Planet is committed to building a community where everyone belongs and we invite people from all backgrounds to apply.
  • Planet is an inclusive community and we know that everyone has their own needs.

Requirements

  • 6+ years of relevant experience
  • 4+ years of experience leading software engineering teams
  • Bachelor's degree in a relevant field
  • Track record of hiring and leading founding engineering teams in a startup or high-growth "intrapreneurial" environment.
  • Experience and enthusiasm for leading AI engineering teams that have successfully elevated research prototypes into production-grade applications.
  • Technical Breadth: While you may not be the deepest specialist on the team, you have the breadth to synthesize input from AI researchers and frontend experts to make sound architectural and personnel decisions.
  • This includes an ability to identify optimizations that may be better handled with a collaboration with a research team (eg. request development of a fine tuned model for a slow but simple LLM call)
  • LLM Observability and Monitoring: Prior experience with tools and techniques for managing non-deterministic systems (e.g., LangSmith, Arize, or similar).
  • Personally AI-native: you write production code with AI tools, have strong opinions on how AI is changing the engineering SDLC, and are 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. This enthusiasm should not only inform the product features, but should also foster a culture of developer workflows that take an AI-assisted development approach
  • 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: While you may not be the deepest specialist on the team, you have the breadth to synthesize input from AI researchers and frontend experts to make sound architectural and personnel decisions. This includes an ability to identify optimizations that may be better handled with a collaboration with a research team (eg. request development of a fine tuned model for a slow but simple LLM call)
  • Pragmatic Execution: A "good enough-move on" mentality that avoids seeking perfection at the cost of delivering meaningful customer value.
  • Impact focused: You are excited by building an application that once launched, will give researchers, journalists, governments, and NGOs the ability to explore the world using natural language and surface crucial insights that used to take months to find.
  • What Makes You Stand Out:

Nice to have

  • Experience with geospatial data or planetary-scale analytics is highly preferred.

Skills

  • Welcome to Planet.
  • operationalizing promising AI research into delivery-focused enterprise "productization".
  • Our goal is to make these complex insights accessible through an intuitive interface that requires zero user training.

Compensation

  • The US base salary range for this full-time position at the commencement of employment is listed below.
  • The final salary range is determined by job related experience, skills and location.
  • Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process.
  • San Francisco Salary Range
  • $182,900 - $228,600 USD

Benefits

  • Partner with Product and Design to translate the ai.planet.com vision into a realistic technical roadmap, identifying "long-pole" technical risks early to keep the team unblocked.
  • 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
  • Commuter Benefits (if local to an office)
  • Volunteering Paid Time Off

Company info

  • Foster an environment where engineers own customer outcomes rather than just technical tasks.
  • You will define what accountability looks like in a high-uncertainty, non-deterministic AI environment.
  • Your focus is on operational excellence, defining success thresholds, managing scope, and ensuring that our bleeding-edge tech graduates into a dependable tool that provides a durable competitive advantage for our customers.
  • To drive this, we are building a new product group focused on launching an AI Geospatial Assistant that transforms how our customers interact with global imagery to solve high-stakes problems in forensics and daily change detection.

Equal opportunity

  • 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.
  • Know Your Rights.
  • EEO statement:
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This listing is sourced directly from Planet's careers page and normalized into a canonical job model.