The posting
Location: 100% Remote in Poland Type: This can be structured as a B2B contract or as an Employment Contract with full benefits. Salary: $107,981 - $122,032 + stock options.
Focal Systems is the industry leader in retail AI solutions. We are headquartered in San Francisco, California with operations in Canada and the UK, 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.
We seek smart, creative and passionate people who want to help build a great and enduring company and deploy Deep Learning to the world!
What We're Looking For
We're looking for a Data/Reporting Team Lead to own the numbers that decide how the world's largest grocers run their stores — which shelves get filled, which tasks get worked, where millions in lost sales are won back. We're rebuilding the data foundation behind that intelligence from the ground up, and it has to be flawless. You'll own it end to end and build the team around you.
You are a self-starter who thrives on ownership. You think in pipelines and projections, you obsess over correctness, and you lead a small senior team without ever leaving the code behind. You connect raw data to real customer impact — and you want your work to be the source of truth a multi-billion-dollar retail operation runs on.
What You Will Do
You will lead a small, senior data/reporting team and stay hands-on in the pipeline yourself. You'll set the bar for what "accurate" means at Focal and own the system that turns billions of raw store signals into numbers customers trust.
Additionally, you will
- Own the accuracy and reliability of customer-facing reporting — imports, processing pipelines, reports, dashboards, and exports
- Build and lead the data platform: Snowflake CDC pipelines, DBT transformations, and silver/gold data layers served through clean APIs
- Engineer the tooling that keeps data honest — gold-set reconciliation, drift detection, and point-in-time state reconstruction across the entire system
- Own compute and cost: right-size pipelines (tiered compute for regional vs. chain-wide jobs) and tune queries for speed and price
- Set the technical bar for the team — plan, review, mentor, and own the outcome end to end
- Partner with backend, analytics, and customer-facing teams so reporting stays consistent on every surface a customer sees
What You Need To Be Successful
- Bachelor's in CS, EE, or equivalent practical experience
- 7+ years of professional software/data engineering experience, including ownership of production data systems
- Strong Python skills, with strong performance-oriented leg
- Advanced SQL, including query-plan reading, index/optimization work on large tables
- Hands-on experience with a modern cloud data warehouse (Snowflake or equivalent) and transformation frameworks (DBT or similar)
- Experience with CDC / streaming pipelines and data-intensive applications
- A track record of owning data correctness in production — reconciliation, validation, and chasing down drift
- Range across the stack: data, infrastructure, and enough backend to ship end to end
- Experience with CI/CD tools, Docker, and cloud deployments a plus
- Compute/cost optimization, warehouse performance tuning, or BI/embedded analytics (Sigma or similar) a plus
- Technical leadership experience — you raise the bar for the engineers around you and don't wait to be told what to own
- Startup mentality, team player
- Fluent in Polish with advanced English skills (written & spoken)
- Excellent written and verbal communication, including presenting to non-technical stakeholders
- Flexibility in adjusting working hours to meet the needs of the global and time zone-diverse team (urgent tasks or meetings may occur outside of regular CEST working hours)
- Strong work ethic — drives projects to completion and holds the team to its commitments
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 10+ 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.
- A Foundational Role — This is not dashboard maintenance. You're building a system accurate enough that head offices trust it over their own numbers, with the autonomy to make the calls and see your work shape how the world's biggest retailers operate.
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.
