Staff Software Engineer

Industrious Ventures; Los Angeles (CA); On-site; USD 130,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health Insurance; medical, vision, dental, & life insurance

Paid Parental Leave

Employee Stock Option Plan

Team outings and group lunches

Flexible Fridays and PTO

401K

Job summary

First Resonance is seeking a Staff Software Engineer in Los Angeles. This role involves building and maintaining high-performance backend services for our ION Factory OS, bridging code with AWS infrastructure, and driving reliability practices.

The ideal candidate will have over 8 years of software engineering experience, strong coding skills in languages such as Python and Go, and deep expertise in AWS. The position comes with excellent perks including health insurance and flexibility in work.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• Strong hands-on coding skills in modern backend languages: Python, Go, Node.js.
• Proven experience building and managing complex systems on AWS using Infrastructure as Code.
• Understanding of distributed systems and API design.
• Proven leadership experience in large technical initiatives.

Responsibilities

• Build, scale, and maintain backend services and APIs.
• Own the relationship between code and AWS infrastructure.
• Evaluate and evolve backend and cloud architecture.
• Establish reliability practices and enhance performance.
• Mentor engineers on backend best practices.

Skills

Production-grade backend coding

AWS infrastructure management

Strong hands-on coding skills

Systems thinking

Leadership in technical initiatives

Tools

AWS (EC2, EKS, RDS)

Terraform

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 Staff Software Engineer who is an exceptional backend engineer equally comfortable writing production-grade application code and architecting the AWS cloud infrastructure it runs on. This is a role for a systems thinker who wants to split their time between scaling our backend codebase and optimizing our cloud footprint. If you love building elegant APIs and configuring the Kubernetes clusters or terraforming the AWS environments that support them, you’ll thrive here.

What you’ll do

• Write and Architect Backend Code: Build, scale, and maintain high-performance backend services and APIs that power the ION Factory OS.

• Bridge Code and Infrastructure: Own the relationship between our application layer and our AWS infrastructure. You’ll ensure our cloud architecture perfectly supports our software delivery.

• Own Architecture at Scale: Evaluate and evolve our backend and cloud architecture to support massive growth in customers, data volume, and product surface area.

• Drive Reliability and Uptime: Establish and improve reliability practices (SLOs/SLIs, incident response, postmortems, capacity planning) at both the application and infrastructure levels.

• Performance Leadership: Identify systemic bottlenecks; lead optimization initiatives across application code, databases, caching, async processing, and AWS services.

• Build Leverage for the Team: Create scalable primitives (libraries, patterns, CI/CD tooling, paved roads) that enable product teams to ship code faster with less risk.

• Mentor and Set the Technical Bar: Coach engineers on backend best practices, operational maturity, and cloud architecture; lead by example through hands-on delivery.

What success looks like (first 90 days)

• Ship high-quality backend code to production while gaining a deep understanding of our current AWS infrastructure.

• Produce a clear, prioritized backend and infrastructure assessment: current-state risks, near-term hardening plan, and a 6–12 month scaling roadmap.

• Lead at least one high-impact initiative that materially improves application uptime, database performance, or developer velocity.

Minimum qualifications

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a proven track record of shipping production-grade backend code and owning infrastructure.

• Strong hands-on coding skills in modern backend languages (e.g., Python, Go, Node.js). Note: This is a coding-heavy role, not a pure DevOps or configuration position.

• Deep AWS Expertise: Demonstrated experience building, deploying, and managing complex systems on AWS (EC2, EKS/ECS, RDS, VPCs, IAM, etc.) using Infrastructure as Code (e.g., Terraform).

• Systems Thinking: Deep understanding of distributed systems, relational databases, caching, message queues, and API design.

• Leadership: Track record of leading large technical initiatives across teams or across a complex codebase.

Preferred qualifications

• Prior experience as a Staff Software Engineer, Tech Lead, or senior platform engineer in a high-scale environment.

• Depth in one or more of: SRE/reliability engineering, database scalability, multi-tenant architectures, or zero-downtime data migrations.

• Experience building internal platforms and developer tooling that abstract infrastructure complexities away from product engineers.

• 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.