Principal Platform Engineer

First ResonanceLos Angeles, CA

About The Position

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.

Requirements

  • 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.

Nice To Haves

  • 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.

Responsibilities

  • 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.

Benefits

  • 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.
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