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.