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Salary: USD 107,981 - 122,032 / annual
Focal Systems is an AI-first company automating and optimizing brick-and-mortar retail using deep learning computer vision. The company is deployed at scale with top global retailers and is headquartered in San Francisco with operations in Canada, the UK, and a tech hub in Poland.
You will lead a small, senior data/reporting team while remaining hands-on in the pipeline yourself. This role owns the accuracy and reliability of customer-facing reporting systems that serve billions of raw store signals to the world's largest grocers—determining which shelves get filled, which tasks get worked, and where millions in lost sales are recovered.
Key responsibilities include:
- Owning end-to-end accuracy and reliability of customer-facing reporting (imports, processing pipelines, reports, dashboards, exports)
- Building and leading the data platform: Snowflake CDC pipelines, DBT transformations, and silver/gold data layers served through clean APIs
- Engineering tooling for data integrity: gold-set reconciliation, drift detection, and point-in-time state reconstruction
- Optimizing compute and cost by right-sizing pipelines and tuning queries for speed and price
- Setting technical standards for the team through planning, code review, mentoring, and owning outcomes end-to-end
- Partnering with backend, analytics, and customer-facing teams to ensure reporting consistency
Required qualifications:
- Bachelor's in CS, EE, or equivalent practical experience
- 7+ years of professional software/data engineering experience with production data systems ownership
- Strong Python skills with performance optimization focus
- Advanced SQL including query-plan reading and optimization on large tables
- Hands-on experience with modern cloud data warehouses (Snowflake or equivalent) and transformation frameworks (DBT or similar)
- Experience with CDC/streaming pipelines and data-intensive applications
- Track record of owning data correctness in production (reconciliation, validation, drift detection)
- Full-stack capability: data, infrastructure, and backend knowledge to ship end-to-end
- Technical leadership experience that raises the bar for engineers around you
- Fluent Polish with advanced English (written and spoken)
- Startup mentality and strong communication skills
Desired: CI/CD tools, Docker, cloud deployments, compute/cost optimization, warehouse performance tuning, or BI/embedded analytics experience.
