Senior Program Manager, Professional Services for Defense and Intelligence
Application analysis
Senior Program Manager, Professional Services for Defense and Intelligence at Planet is a forward deployed defense / aerospace role for engineers who want customer-facing technical work with real deployment ownership.
Reading this role
This Technical Leadership role centers on team leadership, customer program ownership, and scaling delivery playbooks. Key signals from the listing: Senior scope.
About Planet
Defense technology companies combine startup velocity with government deployment constraints and security requirements. The role is anchored in Berlin, UK, so expect on-site customer work in that region.
Signals in the listing
Stand out for Senior Program Manager, Professional Services for Defense and Intelligence
- Lead your application with one paragraph tying Senior Program Manager, Professional Services for Defense and Intelligence to a specific customer or deployment you owned — Planet hires for shipped outcomes, not tool lists.
- Quantify team and program scale: people managed, number of concurrent customer deployments, and revenue or mission outcomes influenced.
- Explain how you built repeatable playbooks so delivery quality did not depend on one hero engineer.
- This role is tied to Berlin, UK — mention willingness to work on-site with customers and any existing ties to that market (clients, partners, or domain knowledge).
Stand out at Planet
- Demonstrate clearance readiness with a concrete example — Planet will probe for specifics, not buzzwords.
- Demonstrate operational rigor with a concrete example — Planet will probe for specifics, not buzzwords.
- Highlight classified or regulated environment experience and comfort with on-site customer work.
- Read recent engineering blog posts, product launches, and customer stories on planet.com — reference one explicitly in your outreach to show genuine interest.
Tailored from this listing’s title, company, and description. Always verify requirements on the company careers page before applying.
Role description
Welcome to Planet. We believe in using space to help life on Earth. Planet designs, builds, and operates the largest constellation of imaging satellites in history. This constellation delivers an unprecedented dataset of empirical information via a revolutionary cloud-based platform to authoritative figures in commercial, environmental, and humanitarian sectors. We are both a space company and data company all rolled into one. Customers and users across the globe use Planet's data to develop new technologies, drive revenue, power research, and solve our world’s toughest obstacles. As we control every component of hardware design, manufacturing, data processing, and software engineering, our office is a truly inspiring mix of experts from a variety of domains. We have a people-centric approach toward culture and community and we strive to iterate in a way that puts our team members first and prepares our company for growth. Join Planet and be a part of our mission to change the way people see the world. Planet is a global company with employees working remotely world wide and joining us from offices in San Francisco, Washington DC, Germany, Austria, Slovenia, and The Netherlands.
About the Role:
The Senior Program Manager, Professional Services for Defense and Intelligence is an experienced technologist who guides the strategy and execution of one or more teams across multiple projects or workstreams. They are an exemplary team leader who works with customers to make them successful users of Planet’s product offerings at a global scale. This role provides leadership and technical oversight for the Professional Services team, independently identifying and tackling projects tha