Portfolio Careers

Discover opportunities for a brighter future

Principal Software Infrastructure Engineer - CO or MA

PlanetIQ

PlanetIQ

Other Engineering
Golden, CO, USA
USD 180k-230k / year + Equity
Posted on Oct 4, 2025

PlanetiQ is looking for an infrastructure engineer to set up, manage, and maintain a compute environment for both AI/ML applications as well as traditional distributed, high performance computing tasks related to weather prediction. Responsiveness to the needs of scientific and machine learning work flows is a must.

  • Core Function: You are an 'engineer's engineer' whose background is skewed heavily towards the ops and infrastructure side, i.e. with a heavier focus on the operational, engineer level stuff, rather than the data scientist side.
    • Designs and Builds the Engine: You are the one who architects and implements the HPC cluster, the cloud environment, and the large-scale storage solutions. You don't just submit jobs to a pre-existing cluster; you are the one who built it and keeps it running.
    • Automates Everything: Your mindset is rooted in Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) and automation. Your accomplishments would be in areas like creating scalable provisioning systems, building CI/CD pipelines for infrastructure, and ensuring the entire environment is reproducible and maintainable.
    • Owns Reliability and Performance: You have the DNA of a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE). You are obsessed with uptime, performance bottlenecks, and monitoring. You are the person who gets called when the system is slow, and you know how to dive deep into the Linux kernel, the network stack, or the storage I/O to find the root cause.
  • Technical DNA:
    • A deep, first-principles understanding of your craft. You can answer drill-down questions and discuss the lower levels of the tools you use, not just the surface-level application.
    • You are a Computer Science generalist who understands and can explain core concepts like data structures and algorithms or the difference between a file system and an object store.
    • You have good programming chops. We write most of our code in Python and C++, but strong ability in other languages is also acceptable. Strong knowledge of Linux/UNIX and facility with shell scripting is also highly desirable.
  • Domain & Background:
    • Your experience comes from a scientific or engineering focus, not business data engineering, or business intelligence.
    • You have a genuine engagement or interest in Earth science predictions.
  • Mindset:
    • You have a hands-on Individual Contributor (IC) mentality. We are not looking for a hands-off architect, which is not a fit for our small team. However, there will be an opportunity for you to pass operational support reins to a more junior staff member once a given system is running.
    • You are comfortable in an environment defined by direct, frank, honest communication.

Compensation and Benefits

  • 180k - 230k base salary, commensurate with ability and experience.
  • Equity in the form of stock options in a venture-backed startup
  • Annual performance bonus
  • 33 days PTO per year including holidays and sick days
  • 401(k) plan
  • Medical/Dental/Vision insurance with fully paid premiums
  • Relocation reimbursement, if needed

Schedule:

  • 8 hour workday overlapping with US ET or MT time zones
  • Monday to Friday
  • Full-time
  • Hybrid work environment, at least three days in-office per week in the Golden, CO or Boston, MA area.

About PlanetiQ

PlanetiQ is a well-capitalized venture capital backed company with investors from Silicon Valley, New York, Los Angeles, and Denver. PlanetiQ is operating and expanding the world's most powerful GNSS Radio-Occultation weather satellites in a dedicated satellite constellation.