[Hiring] Platform Engineer @Focal Systems

Role Description

We are looking for a Platform Engineer to own the platform that every image from every store passes through: ingestion, Kafka streaming, Python services, GPU model inference, databases, storage, and the GCP and Kubernetes layer underneath. The team is small, so there is no separate SRE, DBA or release team. When a pipeline slows down, you find out whether the cause is a Kafka consumer, a MySQL query, an autoscaler or a node pool, and you fix it, including in the application code. The role is cloud-only, with no on-prem or datacenter hardware, and CI/CD pipelines are a small part of it.

The core challenge is scale. We are processing hundreds of millions of images per day across tens of thousands of retail locations globally, and that number is growing fast. Load will grow by an order of magnitude, and your job is to make sure cost and operational effort do not grow with it.

What You Will Do

• Own the design, operation and cost of Focal's production platform on GCP: Kubernetes, Kafka, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, object storage.
• Drive measurable reductions in COGS and latency, for example lowering GPU inference cost per store through machine types, batching, autoscaling or scheduling, and report the numbers.
• Read, debug and change Python (FastAPI, Kafka consumers) backend services.
• Fix throughput bottlenecks such as consumer lag at store opening.
• Rework metrics, alerts and dashboards for incident response.
• Build tooling that gives engineers access to data across regions and storage systems in minutes instead of days.
• Maintain infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Helm) and the deployment path to production.

Qualifications

• Must have Python as a software engineer, not only for scripting.
• 5+ years building and operating production backend systems on a cloud platform.
• Hands-on production experience operating at least one stateful system under load.
• Kubernetes in production, including scheduling, resource limits, autoscaling.
• Debugging production incidents across layers.
• Observability with Prometheus, Grafana, Grafana Mimir and Sentry, or equivalent.
• Terraform or another infrastructure-as-code tool.

Requirements

• Nice to have MySQL query tuning; Kafka internals.
• GPU workloads or ML inference serving in production.
• Go, Snowflake, Airflow, CircleCI, Helm, and blue/green or canary releases.

About you

• You take ownership of problems end to end and follow them into whichever layer they lead.
• You make decisions from data and prioritize well in startup/scaleup environments.
• Advanced written and spoken English.
• Comfortable coordinating across time zones with a global team.
• Comfortable with a shared on-call rotation.

Benefits

• Competitive Salary & Attractive Stock
• Paid Time Off
• Team Retreats
• Education grants