Infrastructure Engineer

Position: Infrastructure Engineer
Location: Poland/Europe - Remote
Type: This can be structured as a B2B contract or Employment Contract with full benefits
Salary: $102,000 - $117,500 + stock options

Who We Are

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.

What You Will Do

• 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.

What You Need to Be Successful

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.

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.

Why Focal Systems
Strong Values and Mission - We are a tightly-knit team with an ambitious mission and a strong set of core values, which define our approach to business and have successfully guided us since inception.

Exceptional Team - We are a team of hard-working, fun-loving professionals from some of the most eminent universities, research labs, and tech companies of our time. We pride ourselves on recruiting exceptional individuals to help us redefine the state-of-the-art.

Outstanding Partners - We work with some of the largest retailers in the world and have a world-class roster of investors, advisors and partners to support & advise us in our endeavors.

What we offer
We care deeply about the health, happiness, and wellbeing of all of our employees. We offer:

• Competitive Salary & Attractive Stock
• Paid Time Off 
• Team Retreats 
• Education grants

Note: Our pay bands are driven by market benchmarks in the target geography for hiring. Our posted ranges typically include multiple job levels. A candidate's level is determined by their performance throughout our talent acquisition process including technical screens, behavior interviews, presentations, work samples, and references. We will communicate transparently with the candidate at final stages regarding how we have leveled them, and what salary range that places them into. Placement within range is equally determined by education, general experience in your profession, specific experience in our domain, and your performance in the talent acquisition process. It is rare to receive an offer at the top of the range for a role.