---
title: 'Principal Platform Engineer at First Resonance'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/principal-platform-engineer-first-resonance-los-angeles-qn7yx5kadq1j'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-04'
---

# Principal Platform Engineer at First Resonance

- **Company:** First Resonance
- **Location:** Los Angeles, CA
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** onsite
- **Posted:** 2026-05-11
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-04
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/first-resonance/e12450fb-f9d0-4799-80ef-6a5c26224f29

## Job description

## OVERVIEW

First Resonance builds the ION Factory OS — the operating system powering next-generation manufacturing for companies building rockets, satellites, eVTOLs, clean energy systems, robotics, and autonomous vehicles. We’ve invested heavily in forward-deployed engineers at the customer edge. Now we’re strengthening the hub.

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

## WHAT YOU’LL DO

- 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.

## MINIMUM QUALIFICATIONS

- 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.

## PREFERRED QUALIFICATIONS

- Prior experience as a Staff/Principal Engineer (or equivalent scope) at a high-scale infrastructure org.
- Depth in one or more of: SRE / reliability engineering, performance engineering, database scalability, multi-tenant architectures, zero-downtime migrations.
- Experience building internal platforms that enable other engineers (tooling, CI/CD, shared services, paved roads).
- Experience in or affinity for manufacturing, industrial software, or hard-tech customer environments.

## Benefits & Perks

- Health Insurance; medical, vision, dental, & life insurance.
- Paid Parental Leave.
- Employee Stock Option Plan.
- Team outings, group lunches, open office, happy hours.
- Paid holidays, sick days.
- Flexible Friday and PTO.
- 401K.

First Resonance is an equal opportunity employer dedicated to building an inclusive and diverse workforce.

First Resonance participates in E-Verify. As part of our onboarding process, a new hire's Form I-9 information will be shared with the federal government to confirm they are authorized to work in the U.S.

Pay is based on factors such as (but not limited to) scope and responsibilities of the position, candidate's work experience and skillset, and location.

First Resonance accelerates the speed and reliability of hardware development for companies manufacturing the next generation of hardware products. This includes space exploration, electric airplanes, autonomous vehicles, nuclear reactors, robotics, and more. We are a group of software, hardware, and manufacturing engineers that are bringing the best of modern UX and data science to an industry that has been overly rigid in its innovation. We are removing the barriers preventing radical advancement by providing tools to manufacturing engineers and operators to move information more freely, collaborate with their teams more easily, and use the power of data to predict problems and provide insights that result in better hardware quality and delivery.

## About First Resonance

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: First Resonance develops the ION Factory Operating System (a modern Manufacturing Execution System) to help complex hardware and advanced manufacturing companies move from prototype to production with speed, traceability, and compliance.
- **Entity Type**: Private (funding stage not publicly disclosed)
- **Headquarters**: El Segundo, California, USA
- **Founded**: 2019
- **Founders**: Karan Talati (CEO) — the company was founded by former engineers from SpaceX and NASA-related companies who needed a better platform for rapid engineering and manufacturing iteration.

## Core Business
- Primary industry/industries: Advanced Manufacturing Software, Industrial IoT, Manufacturing Execution Systems (MES), Aerospace & Defense, Medical Devices, Climate Tech
- Target customers: B2B, Enterprise — hard-tech manufacturers including spacecraft builders, nuclear innovators, robotics leaders, and other quality-critical discrete manufacturers
- Mission or purpose statement: "Enable the next generation of hardware companies to bring their inventions to market sooner, many of which have the potential to fix some of the massive challenges that threaten our existence."

## Products & Services
- **[ION Factory OS]**: The core platform — a modern MES (Manufacturing Execution System) that provides digital work instructions, production planning, and as-built BOMs (a digital replica of every product). It is highly configurable, has an open API, and deploys quickly without costly implementations. It is AI-powered and ensures compliance and traceability.
- **[ION Analytics]**: A module delivering end-to-end visibility across the factory and supply chain, root cause analysis for slow output and quality issues, and true cost tracking per assembly (labor, components, sub-assemblies).
- **[ION AutoPlan]**: A forecasting and planning module that uses real-time inventory and capacity data to calculate accurate start dates and set reliable delivery expectations.
- **[ION Enhances]**: A module focused on process and quality management, including non-conformance tracking and resolution workflows.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Not publicly disclosed (private company)
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Not publicly listed; the company is recognized by Built In as a top workplace and is a member of the "Black Flag 100." They highlight deployments in GovCloud and FedRAMP environments, and maintain SOC 2 certification and ITAR compliance.
- **Growth Signals**: Actively hiring across multiple US cities (Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Denver, Austin) for roles like Forward Deployed Software Engineer, Senior Technical Product Manager, and Product Marketing Manager. The company has a "Hybrid" workplace model with flexible on-site expectations. The company is expanding its presence in the AI and developer community space.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Deep domain expertise**: Founded by former SpaceX and NASA engineers who directly experienced the pain points of legacy MES systems.
- **Security & compliance moat**: Deploys in GovCloud and FedRAMP environments, holds SOC 2 certification, and complies with ITAR regulations — making it the trusted choice for defense, aerospace, and other highly regulated industries.
- **Modern architecture**: Open API, highly configurable, and fast to deploy — a direct alternative to slow, rigid legacy MES systems.
- **Traceability**: The as-built BOM (aBOM) model provides unparalleled, real-time traceability across every part, upgrade, and servicing workflow.
- **AI-powered**: The platform leverages AI to optimize production, compliance, and quality.

## Strategic Focus
- **Scaling the platform**: Expanding the ION Factory OS to serve more advanced manufacturing sectors, including aerospace, defense, medical devices, and climate tech.
- **Security & compliance leadership**: Doubling down on GovCloud, FedRAMP, SOC 2, and ITAR certifications to serve the most demanding government and industry clients.
- **Building the developer community**: Hiring a Product Marketing Manager focused on AI-native and developer community growth, signaling a push to make the platform more accessible and developer-friendly.
- **Geographic expansion**: Opening offices and hiring in multiple US tech hubs (San Francisco, Seattle, Denver, Austin) in addition to the El Segundo HQ and Los Angeles base.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Described as "driven, collaborative, and kind." The team values "All Owners, Data Driven, Technical, Customer-Driven, One Team, Secure, Transparent, Ambitious." They emphasize inclusion and equity, with diverse perspectives creating real value.
- **Work model**: Hybrid — employees engage in a combination of remote and on-site work, with flexible time on-site.
- **Perks**: Free snacks and drinks, 401(K), disability and life insurance, company equity, employee stock purchase plan, performance bonuses, generous parental leave, family medical leave, dental, health, and vision insurance, Flexible Spending Account (FSA).
- **Engineering culture**: Uses modern tech stack including Kubernetes, IoT, Amplitude, Google Analytics. The work is deeply technical and impactful — building software that powers rockets, satellites, and medical devices.
- **Growth**: As a 2019 startup with 41 employees, the company is in a high-growth phase with active hiring across multiple roles, offering significant ownership and impact.
- **Location**: HQ in El Segundo, CA (Los Angeles area), with hybrid offices in San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, Denver, and Austin.

## Sources
1. [firstresonance.io](https://www.firstresonance.io/)
2. [firstresonance.io/about](https://www.firstresonance.io/about)
3. [firstresonance.io/careers](https://www.firstresonance.io/careers)
4. [builtin.com/company/first-resonance](https://builtin.com/company/first-resonance)
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/first-resonance](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/first-resonance)

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