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# Software Engineer, Mission Optimization

- **Company:** Planet Labs PBC
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA, United States (Remote available)
- **Experience:** Expert
- **Salary:** $162,600.0 - $203,200.0
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** Data Analysis, Systems Engineering, Continuous Integration, Linux, Python (Programming Language), Operational Data Store, Software Engineering, Datadog, DevOps Tools - Open-source, Orbital Mechanics, Gitlab, Git, Information Technology, Sentry, Data Analytics, Free and Open-Source Software, Docker
- **Published:** October 1, 2026
- **Apply:** https://startup.jobs/senior-software-engineer-mission-optimization-planetlabs-10246512

## About the Role

* 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, or equivalent depth achieved through your work
 * Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, or a related technical field
 * Deep proficiency in Python or a comparable language, with a track record of designing and shipping systems that other people depend on
 * Ability to take an ambiguous, loosely scoped problem and drive it to a measurable outcome with minimal direction
 * Data-driven approach, including statistical analysis and reasoning over large operational datasets
 * Effective written and verbal communication with technical and non-technical audiences.
 * Experience mentoring or technically leading other engineers

What Makes You Stand Out:

 * Familiarity with satellite engineering, orbital mechanics, or the space environment and its operational constraints
 * Hands-on experience operating spacecraft or other remote/autonomous systems
 * Experience defining concepts of operations for complex systems
 * Background in optimization, scheduling, or operations research - constraint solvers, heuristics, combinatorial optimization
 * Experience with DevOps tooling and practices (Git, GitLab, Docker, CI/CD, Linux, Sentry, Datadog)
 * Contributions to open-source software

## Description

The Mission Optimization team is responsible for continuously improving the operations and productivity of the world's largest Earth observation satellite constellation. We identify, triage, and resolve the bottlenecks that limit what our fleets can deliver - from contact scheduling and downlink latency, to collection capacity, to concepts of operation for our future missions.

As a Senior Software Engineer on this team you will own optimization initiatives end to end: framing an ambiguous operational problem with data, designing the solution, and driving it into production. You'll work closely with spacecraft and systems engineering groups to understand what our current and future fleets are actually capable of, with the software and operations teams who build and run the systems you're changing, and with Product to stay anchored to customer commitments and SLA risk. Being as effective at building agreement across those boundaries as you are at writing the code is a core part of this job.

This is a full-time, hybrid role which will require you to work from our San Francisco office 3 days per week.

Impact You'll Own:

 * Own significant optimization initiatives end to end - problem definition, data analysis, solution design, implementation, and measurement of the outcome against fleet SLAs and KPIs
 * Design, develop, and maintain mission-critical software that schedules and optimizes activities across our satellite constellations
 * Define concepts of operations for current fleets and for new missions and customer use cases, working directly with spacecraft, imaging, and systems engineering teams
 * Analyze operational data across the full stack to surface inefficiencies previously missed, and make the case for addressing them
 * Act as a technical advisor within the team and mentor earlier-career engineers
 * Represent the team's technical position with stakeholders across engineering, operations, and product