First Resonance
manufacturing, industrial software, hard-tech
PrincipalPlatformEngineer
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“Principal Platform Engineer at First Resonance. Skills: platform architecture, backend architecture, high-uptime systems, reliability engineering, performance engineering, SRE. Own platform architecture at scale. Evaluate and evolve our backend architecture to support growth in customers, data volume, and product surface area”
What You'll Achieve.
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
Industry & Context.
systems thinking across distributed systems, databases, caching, queues, APIs, and cloud infrastructure; Provide fast, high-quality technical assessment of infrastructure proposals and incoming changes (internal and vendor-driven)
on-call effectiveness
What They're Looking For.
Must Have
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), 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 able to explain tradeoffs clearly and drive alignment
Nice to Have
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
What You'll Do.
Own platform architecture at scale
Evaluate and evolve our backend architecture to support growth in customers
and product surface area
Drive reliability and uptime
Establish and improve reliability practices (SLOs/SLIs
on-call effectiveness
Performance leadership
Identify systemic performance lead initiatives across databases
Review and de-risk change
high-quality technical assessment of infrastructure proposals and incoming changes (internal and vendor-driven)
Build leverage for the team
Create scalable primitives (libraries
platform services) that enable product and forward-deployed teams to ship faster with less risk
Operational excellence
and rollback strategies
Mentor and set the technical bar
Coach engineers on architecture
and high-quality lead by example through hands-on delivery
Partner cross-functionally
Work closely with Product
and field-deployed engineers to balance edge/customer urgency with platform durability
How You'll Work.
Team & Collaboration
Partner cross-functionally; Work closely with Product, Security, and field-deployed engineers; 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; Coach engineers on architecture, operational maturity, and high-quality lead by example through hands-on delivery
Communication Scope
Excellent written and verbal able to explain tradeoffs clearly and drive alignment
Process & Methodology
Lead large technical initiatives
Full Job Description
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,
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