{"id":702754,"url":"https://alion.io/job/firstresonance-staff-software-engineer","title":"Staff Software Engineer","company":{"id":673414,"name":"First Resonance","domain":"firstresonance.io","url":"https://alion.io/company/firstresonance","size_band":"51-200","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":{"grade":"C","score":68,"open_postings":13,"ghost_share":0.538,"stale_share":0,"repost_share":0,"time_to_fill_p50_days":null,"computed_at":"2026-09-27T05:45:00Z"}},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"staff","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"on_site","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"explicit","locations":["Los Angeles, United States"],"countries":["US"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":175000,"max":210000,"currency":"USD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":210000},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":8,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"Amazon EC2","optional":false},{"name":"Amazon ECS","optional":false},{"name":"Amazon EKS","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":false},{"name":"Go","optional":false},{"name":"IAM","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Node JS","optional":false},{"name":"Python","optional":false},{"name":"Terraform","optional":false},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-06-30T23:58:12Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-06-30","last_verified_at":"2026-09-27T23:18:55Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":89,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":0,"flags":["company_stale"],"days_open":88},"description":"Overview\nFirst 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.\nWe’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.\nWhat you’ll do\nWrite and Architect Backend Code: Build, scale, and maintain high-performance backend services and APIs that power the ION Factory OS.\n\nBridge 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.\n\nOwn Architecture at Scale: Evaluate and evolve our backend and cloud architecture to support massive growth in customers, data volume, and product surface area.\n\nDrive Reliability and Uptime: Establish and improve reliability practices (SLOs/SLIs, incident response, postmortems, capacity planning) at both the application and infrastructure levels.\n\nPerformance Leadership: Identify systemic bottlenecks; lead optimization initiatives across application code, databases, caching, async processing, and AWS services.\n\nBuild 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.\n\nMentor and Set the Technical Bar: Coach engineers on backend best practices, operational maturity, and cloud architecture; lead by example through hands-on delivery.\n\nWhat success looks like (first 90 days)\nShip high-quality backend code to production while gaining a deep understanding of our current AWS infrastructure.\n\nProduce a clear, prioritized backend and infrastructure assessment: current-state risks, near-term hardening plan, and a 6-12 month scaling roadmap.\n\nLead at least one high-impact initiative that materially improves application uptime, database performance, or developer velocity.\n\nMinimum qualifications\n8+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a proven track record of shipping production-grade backend code and owning infrastructure.\n\nStrong 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.\n\nDeep 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).\n\nSystems Thinking: Deep understanding of distributed systems, relational databases, caching, message queues, and API design.\n\nLeadership: Track record of leading large technical initiatives across teams or across a complex codebase.\n\nPreferred qualifications\nPrior experience as a Staff Software Engineer, Tech Lead, or senior platform engineer in a high-scale environment.\n\nDepth in one or more of: SRE/reliability engineering, database scalability, multi-tenant architectures, or zero-downtime data migrations.\n\nExperience building internal platforms and developer tooling that abstract infrastructure complexities away from product engineers.\n\nExperience in or affinity for manufacturing, industrial software, or hard-tech customer environments.\n\nBenefits & Perks\nHealth Insurance; medical, vision, dental, & life insurance.\n\nPaid Parental Leave.\n\nEmployee Stock Option Plan.\n\nTeam outings, group lunches, open office, happy hours.\n\nPaid holidays, sick days.\n\nFlexible Friday and PTO.\n\n401K.\n\nFirst Resonance is an equal opportunity employer dedicated to building an inclusive and diverse workforce.\nFirst 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.\nPay is based on factors such as (but not limited to) scope and responsibilities of the position, candidate's work experience and skillset, and location.\nFirst 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.","description_format":"text","description_chars":5203,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":8,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["401k plan","Health insurance","Life insurance","Parental leave"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"United States","iso":"US","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Artificial Intelligence","Web Design","UI/UX Design"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-11T03:12:28Z"}],"liveness":{"score":14,"band":"cold","label":"Long shot","p_open":1,"p_active":0.394,"p_room":0.36,"age_days":88,"expected_fill_days":49,"reasons":["conf:6","stale_co","win:tail","crowd:"],"computed_at":"2026-09-27T05:45:00Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":210000,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/firstresonance-staff-software-engineer","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/firstresonance-staff-software-engineer.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-09-28T04:28:21Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","usage":{"tier":"crawler","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":2704,"day_limit":5000,"remaining_today":2296,"minute_limit":60,"resets_at":"2026-09-29T00:00:00Z"}}}