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# Principal Platform Engineer

- **Company:** First Resonance
- **Location:** Acton, CA, United States
- **Experience:** Expert
- **Salary:** $170,000.0 - $210,000.0
- **Contract:** Permanent contract
- **Skills:** Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), Cloud Computing, Databases, Continuous Integration, Distributed Systems, Reliability Engineering, Software Engineering, Apache OpenOffice, Caching, Backend, Industrial Software
- **Published:** September 16, 2026
- **Apply:** https://find.jobs/jobs-near-me/apply/ats-redirect/?id=2973720306-2

## About the Role

* 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., * 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.

## Description

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.