Principal Platform Engineer at First Resonance in Los Angeles, CA

OVERVIEW First Resonance builds the ION Factory OS — the operating system powering next-generation manufacturing for companies building rockets, satellites, eVTOLs, clean energy systems, robotics, and autonomous vehicles. We’ve invested heavily in forward-deployed engineers at the customer edge. Now we’re strengthening the hub. We’re hiring a Principal Platform Engineer to serve as a platform leader: someone with deep expertise in software infrastructure and architecture who has built and operated scaled, high-uptime systems. This person will help us scale our backend, raise our reliability and performance bar, and provide sharp technical judgment on infrastructure changes. WHAT YOU’LL DO - Own platform architecture at scale: Evaluate and evolve our backend architecture to support growth in customers, data volume, and product surface area. - Drive reliability and uptime: Establish and improve reliability practices (SLOs/SLIs, incident response, postmortems, on-call effectiveness, capacity planning). - Performance leadership: Identify systemic performance bottlenecks; lead initiatives across databases, APIs, caching, async processing, and observability. - Review and de-risk change: Provide fast, high-quality technical assessment of infrastructure proposals and incoming changes (internal and vendor-driven). - Build leverage for the team: Create scalable primitives (libraries, patterns, tooling, platform services) that enable product and forward-deployed teams to ship faster with less risk. - Operational excellence: Improve monitoring, alerting, dashboards, deployment safety, and rollback strategies. - Mentor and set the technical bar: Coach engineers on architecture, operational maturity, and high-quality execution; lead by example through hands-on delivery. - Partner cross-functionally: Work closely with Product, Security, and field-deployed engineers to balance edge/customer urgency with platform durability. WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE (FIRST 90 DAYS) - Produce a clear, prioritized platform assessment: current-state risks, near-term hardening plan, and a 6–12 month scaling roadmap. - Reduce risk on critical paths by improving observability (service health, latency/error budgets, key dashboards) and deployment safety. - Lead at least one high-impact initiative that materially improves uptime, performance, or developer velocity. MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS - 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant time owning backend/platform systems in production. - Demonstrated experience building and operating high-availability, high-uptime services (including incident response and postmortem culture). - Strong systems thinking across distributed systems, databases, caching, queues, APIs, and cloud infrastructure. - Track record of leading large technical initiatives across teams or across a complex codebase. - Excellent written and verbal communication; able to explain tradeoffs clearly and drive alignment. PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS - Prior experience as a Staff/Principal Engineer (or equivalent scope) at a high-scale infrastructure org. - Depth in one or more of: SRE / reliability engineering, performance engineering, database scalability, multi-tenant architectures, zero-downtime migrations. - Experience building internal platforms that enable other engineers (tooling, CI/CD, shared services, paved roads). - Experience in or affinity for manufacturing, industrial software, or hard-tech customer environments. Benefits & Perks - Health Insurance; medical, vision, dental, & life insurance. - Paid Parental Leave. - Employee Stock Option Plan. - Team outings, group lunches, open office, happy hours. - Paid holidays, sick days. - Flexible Friday and PTO. - 401K. First Resonance is an equal opportunity employer dedicated to building an inclusive and diverse workforce. First Resonance participates in E-Verify. As part of our onboarding process, a new hire's Form I-9 information will be shared with the federal government to confirm they are authorized to work in the U.S. Pay is based on factors such as (but not limited to) scope and responsibilities of the position, candidate's work experience and skillset, and location. First Resonance accelerates the speed and reliability of hardware development for companies manufacturing the next generation of hardware products. This includes space exploration, electric airplanes, autonomous vehicles, nuclear reactors, robotics, and more. We are a group of software, hardware, and manufacturing engineers that are bringing the best of modern UX and data science to an industry that has been overly rigid in its innovation. We are removing the barriers preventing radical advancement by providing tools to manufacturing engineers and operators to move information more freely, collaborate with their teams more easily, and use the power of data to predict problems and provide insights that result in better hardware quality and delivery.