Focal Systems

Role Description We are looking for an Infrastructure Engineer to own and evolve the systems that power Focal at scale. We are looking for someone who can architect, build, and operate production infrastructure. - Work on the design, operation, and continuous improvement of Focal's core infrastructure - cloud, data pipelines, deployments, and observability. - Drive meaningful reductions in COGS and latency without sacrificing reliability. - Architect and maintain scalable, data-heavy backend infrastructure built on Python, FastAPI, Kafka, Docker, and cloud platforms. - Build and operate deployment pipelines - blue/green and canary deployments, CI/CD tooling, and release processes that support zero-downtime launches at scale. - Design and implement monitoring and alerting systems that provide genuine visibility into system health across geographies and environments. - Create tooling that gives engineers and stakeholders transparent, easy access to data stored across varying geographic locations and formats. - Collaborate closely with backend, deep learning, and embedded engineering teams to ensure infrastructure evolves with product and model requirements. Qualifications - 5+ years in infrastructure, platform, or DevOps engineering. - Production experience with GCP at scale. - Kubernetes, Helm and Docker in production. - Python - our stack is Python end-to-end. You'll read, debug, and contribute to backend code daily, so a software development background (not just ops scripting) is essential. - Infrastructure-as-code with Terraform. - Observability with Prometheus - metrics, alerting, and instrumentation. - Solid CI/CD fundamentals and deployment strategies (blue/green, canary, feature flags). Requirements - MySQL - a significant bonus; query tuning and operational knowledge stand out. - MongoDB, Kafka (or comparable streaming platforms), CircleCI. - Experience with data-intensive applications and microservices at scale. About you - You take ownership and prioritize well in a startup environment. - You're well-rounded rather than a lone hero - you cover gaps across the stack and reliably own the day-to-day and less-complex work, freeing the team to focus on the hardest problems. - 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

• Build and maintain scalable backend services using Python (Flask/FastAPI) that process data from 300,000+ IoT devices • Design and develop REST APIs consumed by internal tools and customer-facing applications • Build and improve React/TypeScript frontend features — from translating designs into code to refining existing UI components • Write database queries to analyze how features are actually being used and to debug production issues • Build deployment monitoring and diagnostic tools that give visibility into system health across geographies • Create tools that provide transparency and ease of access into the company's rich datasets stored across varying geographic locations and data formats • Collaborate with engineering teams to ensure data persists in usable formats for frontend, middleware, diagnostics, and Deep Learning pipelines • Remotely debug customer issues across the full stack and find smart solutions that actually work • Partner with the product team to shape user experience — you'll bridge the gap between backend capabilities and what users actually see • Support our customer success team by helping solve client problems • Evaluate incoming requests — assess the effort required vs. potential value delivered • Expand test coverage for critical backend services and frontend user flows • Refactor existing code to reduce complexity and keep things maintainable • Be part of the team that ships weekly releases to customers • Present your work to the company and share what you've shipped

• Triage and resolve customer requests via Zendesk and internal tools • Investigate time-sensitive issues using data to confirm root cause before escalating • Build deep working knowledge of Focal's systems well enough to diagnose issues independently • Communicate clearly with both technical and non-technical stakeholders, in writing and verbally

• Ensure our retail partners receive exceptional day-to-day support. • Own the onboarding process and ongoing engagement with stores. • Drive change management and adoption during onboarding. • Proactively address customer challenges and prioritize enhancement requests. • Serve as a strategic advisor to quantify improvements in store operations.

Role Description Our Customer Integration team has taken every major retailer we've signed through production — and as we add more customers, we’re looking for a senior engineer to lead high-quality deployments, own onboarding and integrations end-to-end, and help define how this function grows. - Work with a real distributed AI system at scale — when a retailer's report is wrong, a pipeline is silently dropping events, task counts diverged somewhere between Kafka, Redis, MySQL, and MongoDB, you'll own the challenged end-to-end, not hand it off after one layer. - Bring new customers live — map their data formats to ours and validate pipelines held up at 10 stores before scaling up to 100 and then a 1000. - Manage live production configuration for dozens of active deployments — granular store configurations, feature flags and so on — where a single mistake can impact shelf monitoring across thousands of stores and be presented in a retailer's morning report. - Build tooling that removes the manual work — identify the patterns and build the systems that make the next deployment faster than the last one. - Work directly with customers when something goes wrong — explain what happened, own the fix, and close the loop. Qualifications - Ownership — When a customer has a problem, you don't wait for it to get assigned. You’ll pick it up, see it through end-to-end, and close the loop. - 4+ years of hybrid experience — You’ve written real production code and worked directly with external stakeholders. - Strong Python — Pandas and NumPy are second nature. You default to an API-first mindset. - Systems thinking — You can hold a complex distributed system in your head, decompose a messy customer problem into its parts, and come back with a solution. - Solid SQL and data work — Diagnostic queries, tracing data inconsistencies, building ETL and transformation pipelines. - Working knowledge of distributed systems — Kafka, async pipelines, caching layers. - Clear technical communication — You can explain a root cause to a non-technical customer or stakeholder without jargon. Requirements - Nice to Have: GCP, Kubernetes, or Helm experience (reading configs and logs, not managing infrastructure). Benefits - Competitive Salary & Attractive Stock - Paid Time Off - Team Retreats - Education grants

• Own analytical problems end to end from problem framing and metric definition through data acquisition, modeling, validation, and stakeholder rollout • Build predictive and inferential models such as forecasts, propensity and uplift models, and survival or duration analyses, where they meaningfully improve a product or operational decision • Develop statistical methods and reusable analyses for measuring performance, including detection accuracy, intervention impact, and downstream operational outcomes • Partner with Product, Engineering, and Operations to define key metrics, implement new features, and translate business questions into well-scoped analytical work • Audit system outputs and provide structured feedback that improves product accuracy and reliability • Communicate findings through dashboards, written analyses, and stakeholder presentations that lead to concrete decisions • Help define best practices around data quality, experimentation, modeling, and reproducibility, and contribute to the team’s data contracts and SOPs

• Drive key Focal initiatives, directly influencing strategic product roadmap • Work closely with the design, engineering and customer success teams on executing the product vision • Work with the largest retailers in the world on integrating our technology into their operational processes • Ensure features and bugs are reported and prioritized • Keep roadmap, progress trackers and documentation up to date and maintained • Plan, monitor and analyze key metrics for the performance of our models and infrastructure • Proactively seek a firsthand understanding of issues and areas for improvement for our products, including frequent client interviews and visits

• Act as the point of contact for all contractor and third-party inquiries, ensuring clear communication and timely resolution of any issues. • Coordinate and support all planning activities related to store renovations, maintenance visits, and other operational activities. Ensure all tasks are completed on schedule and within budget. • Review and sign off on completed work, ensuring that all tasks meet company standards before final approval. • Manage administrative tasks including purchase orders (POs), invoicing, and related paperwork to ensure smooth financial operations. • Compile and distribute maintenance visit summaries, documenting key actions, progress, and any follow-up required. • Support the review and management of payroll, ensuring timely and accurate processing of hours worked, including expense submissions. • Oversee renovations for customer stores, ensuring all tasks are completed on time, within budget, and in compliance with company standards. • Generate and present regular reports on financial metrics, project progress, and operational KPIs.

• Support the team in ensuring the quality and reliability of our products across UI, APIs, and backend systems. • Gain hands-on experience with testing frameworks, automation tools, and data validation while contributing to improving our overall quality standards. • Support GUI / API testing and backend validation to ensure systems behave as expected. • Work closely with engineers to ensure quality coverage across frontend and backend features. • Identify bugs, document issues clearly, and support their resolution. • Continuously build your knowledge of QA best practices, tools, and automation strategies.

• Bring your experience to the team as we upgrade our infrastructure and build a foundation for future analytics work • Write SQL queries to pull and analyze data from multiple sources • Transform complex, unstructured datasets into clean, presentation-ready formats • Develop dashboards, reports, and visualizations that highlight trends and drive strategic decisions • Audit system outputs and provide feedback to improve functionality • Collaborate with Product, Engineering, and Operations teams to identify key metrics and design reporting solutions • Present findings to stakeholders in a clear, impactful way • Help define and refine best practices for data quality, reporting, and analysis