Platform Engineer (Backend Infrastructure)
Focal Systems2 days ago
Remote, Portugal or Remote, PolandSenior
Base Salary
$102k - $118k/yr
Responsibilities
- Own the design, operation, and cost optimization of the production platform on GCP, including Kubernetes, Kafka, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, and object storage.
- Reduce GPU inference cost, latency, and operational effort through machine-type selection, batching, autoscaling, and scheduling improvements.
- Read, debug, and modify Python and FastAPI backend services and Kafka consumers to resolve platform and scaling problems.
- Diagnose and fix throughput bottlenecks involving Kafka partitions, consumer throughput, databases, and autoscaling.
- Improve metrics, alerts, dashboards, incident response, postmortems, and capacity planning.
- Build tooling that provides engineers with rapid access to data across regions and storage systems.
- Maintain Terraform and Helm infrastructure-as-code and the production deployment path.
- Coordinate with backend, deep learning, and edge teams to support new products and models.
Requirements
- At least 5 years of experience building and operating production backend systems on a cloud platform.
- Strong Python software engineering experience, including weekly contributions to backend code.
- Hands-on production experience operating a stateful system under load, such as Kafka, MySQL, PostgreSQL, or MongoDB.
- Production Kubernetes experience, including scheduling, resource limits, KEDA autoscaling, GPU node pools, and pod debugging.
- Experience debugging production incidents across application, messaging, database, orchestration, and network layers.
- Experience with observability using Prometheus, Grafana, Grafana Mimir, Sentry, or equivalent tools.
- Experience with Terraform or another infrastructure-as-code tool.
- Advanced written and spoken English and comfort coordinating across time zones and participating in a shared on-call rotation.
- Preferred experience includes MySQL query tuning, Kafka internals, Confluent Cloud, Kafka Connect, GPU workloads, ML inference serving, cloud cost optimization, Go, Snowflake, Airflow, CircleCI, Helm, and blue/green or canary releases.
Benefits
- Remote role in Poland/Europe, structured as either a B2B contract or an employment contract with full benefits.
- Competitive salary and stock options.
- Paid time off.
- Team retreats.
- Education grants.
Tech Stack
Apache AirflowApache KafkaCircleCIFastAPIGoGoogle Cloud PlatformGrafanaHelmKubernetesMongoDBMySQLPostgreSQLPrometheusPythonRedisSnowflakeTerraform
About Focal Systems
Focal Systems builds an AI-powered shelf-monitoring platform for brick-and-mortar retailers, combining low-cost shelf cameras with computer vision and a cloud service to automate on-shelf availability checks and merchandising workflows. It sells hardware plus software and analytics subscriptions that integrate with store systems to reduce manual scanning and surface real-time inventory insights. Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Burlingame, California, the company is privately held and raised a Series B in 2021.