Vice President & Chief Information Security Officer

About the Role:

As the Vice President and Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), you will serve as a key executive and thought leader driving the strategic evolution of Planet’s information security landscape. You will architect a sophisticated, enterprise-wide security strategy that directly aligns with our broader business goals and anticipates the rapidly evolving AI threat landscape. As a visionary leader, you will ensure our defenses outpace both emerging technologies and sophisticated global threat actors while owning enterprise and third-party cyber risk. You will balance the confidentiality, integrity, privacy, and recoverability of Planet’s global assets with workforce productivity and agility. In this role, you will oversee departmental budgets and results while empowering a capable tier of front-line managers to execute your vision. This is a unique opportunity to build a predictive, future-proof security organization at a rapidly growing company.

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

Impact You’ll Own:

• Spearhead the multi-year strategic plan for information and cloud security, integrating predictive AI defense strategies.
• Collaborate with business and technology teams to ensure security and compliance postures exceeding industry standards.
• Influence enterprise-wide strategic direction by blending functional security goals with broader business objectives.
• Empower front-line managers through delegation, selection, and continuous professional development.
• Resolve highly complex business problems, transitioning the department toward proactive, strategic forecasting.
• Manage departmental resources, policy, and personnel with full accountability for budget and performance results.
• Architect proactive, intelligence-driven risk forecasting models and security risk management processes.
• Serve as the ultimate subject matter expert for security issues, including AI governance, secure machine learning pipelines, and space/ground-station asset protection.
• Orchestrate incident response and business recovery plans to safeguard critical global services.
• Participate in external security certifications and manage customer security audits.
• Drive security awareness training programs, ensuring that all employees are trained on information security concepts, emerging social engineering vectors (such as AI-driven phishing), and their role in safeguarding Planet.
• Partner with legal and procurement to ensure information security requirements are included in vendor contracts.
• Stay abreast of relevant security developments, industry-wide events, regulations, geopolitical shifts, and emerging technologies.
• Coordinate development and implementation of incident response plans and procedures ensuring that business-critical services are recovered in the event of a security event, and provides direction, support, and in-house consulting in this area.
• Monitor the external threat environment for emerging threats, specifically looking around corners to implement early mitigations, AI-driven counter-measures, and controls where relevant.
• Act as a positive culture carrier who lives the company values and makes decisions that have a broad impact on both people and company financials.
• Build and nurture external networks consisting of industry peers, ecosystem partners, vendors, government intelligence agencies, and other relevant parties.
• Managing and maturing enterprise risk management frameworks and ISO 27001, ISO 42001, ISO 9001, and CMMC certifications.
• Manage and oversee safeguarding manufacturing facilities and R&D environments against physical threats while mitigating global supply chain risks.
• Oversee the establishment and scaling of an international industrial security program managed by your team to govern global clearance reciprocity, international Request for Visit (RFV) pipelines, and multinational contract compliance (including DD-254 equivalents) in strict alignment with NDP-1, ITAR, EAR, and GSIA regulations.

What You Bring:

• Typically 10+ years of relevant work experience and 8+ years of leadership experience.
• Deep industry and commercial awareness, accompanied by a track record of thought leadership, public speaking, and published work in the information security industry.
• Ability to separate the genuinely important from the merely urgent, proactively soliciting ideas and information from multiple external and internal perspectives to forecast risk years in advance.
• Ability to cultivate an approachable leadership style that values patience, empathy, and vulnerability, while understanding the impact of your leadership wake.
• Experience leading a diverse group of people, setting clear expectations, and holding people accountable
• Outstanding written and verbal communication skills, with a focus on explaining security topics, such as the OWASP Top 10, clearly and to a variety of audiences with varying technical sophistication.
• Deep understanding of networking and web application architecture.
• Experience with the operations and security facets of cloud environments (Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform, primarily).
• Experience with common attack scenarios across the layers of our infrastructure (cloud infrastructure, web applications and interfaces, authentication and authorization, network flows, code quality, insider threat, and the like).
• Deep understanding of information security principles and common reconnaissance and exploitation frameworks.
• Occasional travel required for client and site visits.

What Makes You Stand Out:

• Understanding of a wide range of vulnerability classes including modern adversarial AI attacks, model poisoning, and LLM supply chain vulnerabilities.
• Track record of architecting a multi-year security roadmap that successfully anticipated future technology disruptions.
• Prior or current government security clearance.
• Government national security experience.
• Red team experience.
• Prior experience in a public company environment.

Application Deadline:

11:45pm PT on the date stated below. Applications are reviewed on a rolling basis. This posting may be removed earlier than projected if a suitable pool of applications has been received. For this reason, we recommend applying as soon as you are able to.

Benefits While Working at Planet:

These offerings are dependent on employment type and geographical location, based upon applicable law or company policy.

• Comprehensive Medical, Dental, and Vision plans
• Health Savings Account (HSA) with a company contribution
• Generous Paid Time Off in addition to holidays and company-wide days off
• 16 Weeks of Paid Parental Leave
• Wellness Program and Employee Assistance Program (EAP)
• Home Office Reimbursement
• Monthly Phone and Internet Reimbursement
• Tuition Reimbursement and access to LinkedIn Learning
• Equity
• Commuter Benefits (if local to an office)
• Volunteering Paid Time Off

Compensation:

The US base salary range for this full-time position at the commencement of employment is listed below. Additionally, this role might be eligible for discretionary short-term and long-term incentives (bonus and equity). The final salary range is determined by job related experience, skills and location. The range displays our typical hiring range for new hire salaries in US locations only. Your recruiter can share more about the specific salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process.