Principal Platform Engineer, First Resonance

• 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
• 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

Desirable

• This person will help us scale our backend, raise our reliability and performance bar, and provide sharp technical judgment on infrastructure changes
• 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