Senior DevOps Engineer – Kubernetes & Sovereign Deployments

About the role

Planet is building sovereign deployments of its platform for customers who need to keep control of where their data and services run, and is looking for a Senior DevOps Engineer to deliver and run them. The flagship example is the Copernicus Data Space Ecosystem (CDSE), which gives thousands of users free, instant access to Copernicus Sentinel data and processing services, in close collaboration with the European Space Agency and the European Earth Observation community. The role is hands-on, at the intersection of DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering, and works alongside software, platform and infrastructure engineers. It is a full-time hybrid role, with 3 days per week in the Ljubljana or Graz office.

Key responsibilities

• Operate and evolve Kubernetes-based platforms across CDSE and other sovereign deployments, including upgrades, capacity planning, networking and autoscaling.
• Deploy platform services into environments with different hosting, security and data residency constraints, keeping them consistent with other deployments.
• Define infrastructure as code and GitOps-style release workflows (Terraform, Helm, GitLab CI) so environments are reproducible, reviewable and quick to roll out or roll back.
• Own reliability: define SLIs and SLOs, build and tune alerts, Grafana dashboards and runbooks, load test, and report on availability against agreed SLAs.
• Respond to incidents, lead blameless post-mortems, and take part in the on-call rotation for CDSE and related services.
• Operate stateful building blocks such as PostgreSQL/PostGIS, object storage and search indices, including backup, restore and disaster recovery.
• Contribute to security and compliance work: access control, secrets management, patching, vulnerability management and audit evidence.
• Work with project partners and customer technical teams to troubleshoot, plan changes and keep operational documentation accurate.
• Review code and infrastructure changes, mentor teammates, and use AI tooling thoughtfully.

Required profile

• 6+ years in DevOps, SRE or infrastructure engineering, with operational production experience on distributed, low-latency, high-volume services.
• Bachelor's degree in a technical field such as Computer Science, Geosciences or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• Experience with sovereign, regulated or public-sector environments, such as data residency requirements, ISO 27001 or comparable security frameworks.
• Excellent written and verbal communication, and professional English; comfort writing design proposals and collaborating across time zones.

Required skills

• Solid hands-on experience with Kubernetes or Nomad in production, including troubleshooting, upgrades, ingress, networking, resource management and autoscaling.
• Infrastructure as code and CI/CD (Terraform, Helm, GitLab CI), Git and Docker.
• Monitoring and observability tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, centralized logging) and alert definition.
• Linux and networking fundamentals, and scripting in Python, Go or Bash.
• At least one major cloud (GCP or AWS) or comparable infrastructure such as OpenStack, including object storage (S3 or similar).
• Relational databases, ideally PostgreSQL, in an operational setting.
• Incident handling and on-call experience.
• Nice to have: GitOps tooling (Argo CD, Flux), Java services and Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, and Earth Observation data standards (COGs, STAC, OGC, openEO).

What we offer

• Paid time off including vacation, holidays and company-wide days off.
• Employee wellness program, home office reimbursement and monthly phone and internet reimbursement.
• Tuition reimbursement and access to LinkedIn Learning.
• Equity and eligibility for discretionary bonuses.