Principal Platform Engineer

First Resonance•Los 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.