Hiring: Senior Engineering Manager - AI Geospatial Assistant Team Company: Planet Location: San Francisco, CA Job Posted Time: 2026-09-03 14:50:00 Employment Type: Full-time / Hybrid Target Skills & Keywords : LLM About the job Experience: •6+ years of relevant experience •4+ years of experience leading software engineering teams Required Skills: •Our goal is to make these complex insights accessible through an intuitive interface that requires zero user training. Operating with a zero-to-one startup mindset, this team prioritizes weekly learning velocity and customer-driven graduation criteria to move rapidly from private alpha to general availability. •This is a full-time, hybrid role which will require you to work from our San Francisco office 3 days per week. •Build a High-Density Talent Engine: You will be responsible for the full talent lifecycle—from sourcing and hiring the initial high-agency founding squad to designing an onboarding experience that gets specialists productive in a complex geospatial domain. •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. •Partner cross-functionally with AI Researchers: 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. •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 (from Fullstack to Applied AI), navigating their career paths and maintaining high levels of psychological safety and engagement. Qualifications: •Bachelor’s degree in a relevant field •Track record of hiring and leading founding engineering teams in a startup or high-growth "intrapreneurial" environment. •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 •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. •Demonstrated capacity to identify "process bugs" (why a team is slowing down) and implement the cultural or structural changes needed to restore velocity. •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 •LLM Observability and Monitoring: Prior experience with tools and techniques for managing non-deterministic systems (e.g., LangSmith, Arize, or similar). •Public Leadership: You are comfortable representing the team’s work to executive leadership and external stakeholders, acting as a "shield" for your team so they can focus on building. Compensation: •$182,900 - $228,600 / year •Additionally, this role might be eligible for discretionary short-term and long-term incentives (bonus and equity) Interested candidates, please apply directly through the job posting on company's career page or try via AI auto apply on this platform. Don't miss this opportunity to join a forward-thinking team!