Infrastructure Engineer

Focal Systems is the industry leader in retail AI solutions. We are a Silicon Valley-based startup headquartered in San Francisco, with operations in Canada, the UK, multiple EU countries and a tech hub in Poland. We are a Deep Learning-first company. Our mission is to automate and optimize brick-and-mortar retail using deep learning computer vision. Focal Systems has been deployed at scale with some of the top retailers in the world, processing hundreds of millions of images per day across tens of thousands of stores globally.

We were recently named Confluent's inaugural Data Streaming Startup of the Year, a recognition of how seriously we take the engineering challenges at the core of our business.
We seek smart, creative, and passionate people who want to help build a great and enduring company.

What We're Looking For

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.

The core challenge is scale. We are processing millions of images per day across thousands of retail locations globally, and that number is growing fast. Our infrastructure needs to be reliable, cost-efficient, and capable of handling an order-of-magnitude increase in load without a proportional increase in cost or complexity.

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.

Must have

• 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).

Nice to have

• 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.