Ash Hoover
(They/Them)
Senior Software Engineer | Tech Lead
Ash is a senior software engineer and tech lead for an Earth Data Platform team at Planet, a public benefit company that operates over 200 Earth observation satellites with a mission to image the whole world every day, making change visible, accessible and actionable! Ash thinks Planet’s incredible Earth time-machine dataset is relevant to all Earth inhabitants and will enable humanity to better understand and care for our home planet.
Ash enjoys helping people from all walks of life and varied technical backgrounds learn to work with satellite data! In their time at Planet, Ash has contributed to APIs and integrations, machine learning models, developer tools, and applications geared toward transforming petabytes of satellite data into actionable insights. Prior to focusing on analytics and platform elements, Ash collaborated with space systems operators and space mission planners to build Mission Control APIs to support multiple concurrent satellite types and missions, a critical architectural foundation as Planet continues to develop new satellites and pursue additional innovative space missions.
Before joining Planet, Ash developed automated deep learning pipelines at Vidado, an AI platform startup extracting and digitizing data from paper sources for enterprises and nonprofits. The motivation was to help unlock “dark data” from paper archives by leveraging machine learning techniques to automate transformations of scanned pages into structured, querable datasets.
Longer ago, Ash studied energy transfer in photosythetic systems using lasers in an ultrafast spectroscopy lab. They like to say that they zoomed out and slowed down, by going from studying molecular scale dynamics on picosecond timescales to looking at the planet’s changes on a daily cadence.
