Principal Platform Engineer
First Resonance
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