Focused

Build AI-enabled applications using LangChain and LLMs, lead software delivery, and mentor team members. | Hands-on experience with LangChain or similar frameworks and strong full-stack engineering background. | Who we are: At Focused, we move quickly to deliver quality software that achieves client outcomes and meets their customer’s needs. We strategically partner with our clients to leverage our expertise in design and software, while our clients bring their own domain expertise. We work with a variety of clients from different industries, collaborating as we get new products to market, modernizing legacy systems, or helping teams learn the skills they need to be successful. Our values: Listen first • We are experts in product practices but life long learners in the domain of our customers. We research, collaborate, and understand. Learn why • We ask questions and talk to users to understand problem spaces, objectives, and goals, which allows us to deeply invest and drive towards the outcomes of our clients. Love your craft • We love diving into a variety of domains and solving problems. We take pride in delivering value, in communicating progress, and guiding our clients to success. At Focused, our Engineers are both practitioners and experts in their craft. This role would play a crucial role in shaping and implementing engineering best practices and ensuring the successful delivery of complex software projects. With clients, we develop trust and influence - we are unintimidated and unintimidating. With colleagues, we set the standard for how we deliver success for clients. What would you be doing? Build AI-enabled applications leveraging LangChain and LLMs to deliver meaningful, production-ready outcomes for clients. Deep expertise in LangChain, LangGraph and LangSmith Lead teams through end-to-end delivery across the stack, from backend services to modern web UIs. Pair program daily with teammates and clients to share knowledge, improve code quality, and grow together. Practice TDD and continuous refactoring to ensure code is reliable, maintainable, and understandable. Guide architecture decisions to support scalability, observability, and performance. Collaborate closely with designers, product managers, and stakeholders to continuously deliver valuable software. Coach developers on the team through pairing, mentoring, and modeling healthy engineering culture. Influence technical direction beyond the team, working across client orgs and Focused’s internal practices to share lessons, shape approaches, and raise the collective bar. Stay curious through experimenting with new patterns in the GenAI space, share what works (and what doesn’t), and help evolve how we build AI-powered software. We are excited about you, because you: You’re a hands-on, full stack engineer with a strong track record of delivering software in collaborative, agile environments. You’ve worked with LangChain (or similar agentic frameworks), and understand how to architect AI-native systems responsibly and effectively. You have experience leading engineering teams and feel confident mentoring and supporting other developers. You believe that code quality matters, and that TDD and pairing help build better systems and stronger teams. You’ve worked across multiple languages or frameworks (e.g., Python, Node, Java, React, Next.js) and are pragmatic about tool selection. You’re excited about what’s happening in the AI space but stay focused on delivering value. You have experience navigating complex organizations, building bridges across functions, and helping teams adopt modern development practices. You’re as comfortable in the code as you are in a client meeting and can translate technical risks and wins into language anyone can understand. You love to share what you’re learning and make the team around you better. If you had worked at Focused over the last 3 months you may have: Paired with a teammate to build a document Q&A system using LangChain and OpenAI APIs Helped design an architecture that integrates LLM agents into a legacy enterprise workflow Refactored a flaky test suite to support continuous delivery with confidence Mentored a junior dev through their first pairing and TDD session Built and deployed a full stack GenAI MVP with a React frontend and FastAPI backend Facilitated an architecture spike to evaluate vector database options for semantic search Contributed a new section to our internal AI playbook Helped write this job req What to know before you apply: This role will require being in the Chicago office three days per week and up to 20% travel within the United States. Focused is unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of the employment Visa process at this time. The Chicago base salary range for this role is $120,000 - $170,000.

Architect and manage infrastructure including Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, and observability solutions while implementing SRE practices. | 3+ years in Platform Engineering or DevOps with Infrastructure as Code and cloud provider proficiency, plus container and observability framework knowledge. | Who we are: At Focused, we move quickly to deliver quality software that achieves client outcomes and meets their customer’s needs. We strategically partner with our clients to leverage our expertise in design and software, while our clients bring their own domain expertise. We work with a variety of clients from different industries, collaborating as we get new products to market, modernizing legacy systems, or helping teams learn the skills they need to be successful. Our values: Listen first • We are experts in product practices but life long learners in the domain of our customers. We research, collaborate, and understand. Learn why • We ask questions and talk to users to understand problem spaces, objectives, and goals, which allows us to deeply invest and drive towards the outcomes of our clients. Love your craft • We love diving into a variety of domains and solving problems. We take pride in delivering value, in communicating progress, and guiding our clients to success. We are seeking an experienced Senior Platform Consultant to help organizations implement, optimize, and scale their infrastructure. Key Responsibilities: Platform Engineering & Infrastructure Augment existing infrastructure with with integrated observability solutions Implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solutions using Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation, etc. Architect and manage Kubernetes clusters with comprehensive monitoring and logging Build CI/CD pipelines with embedded observability and automated testing Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Establish and maintain Service Level Indicators (SLIs), Objectives (SLOs), and Agreements (SLAs) Implement error budgets, toil reduction strategies, and capacity planning Support incident response procedures and post-mortem processes Cloud & DevOps Engineering Deploy and manage observability infrastructure across AWS, GCP, and Azure Establish security, compliance, and governance frameworks for telemetry data Experience automating Agent Evaluations in CI/CD pipelines and observability backends. Required Qualifications: Platform Engineering & DevOps 3+ years of Platform Engineering or DevOps experience Proficiency with Infrastructure as Code tools (Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation, CDK) Strong experience with CI/CD platforms (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Jenkins, ArgoCD) Cloud & Infrastructure Hands-on experience with major cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure) and their observability services Experience with container technologies (Docker, Podman) and container registries Knowledge of networking, security, load balancing, and distributed systems concepts Site Reliability Engineering Experience implementing SRE practices including error budgets and toil metrics Proficiency in incident management, on-call procedures, and post-mortem culture Experience with capacity planning, performance optimization, and scalability design Programming & Automation Proficiency in multiple programming languages preferred (Go, Python, Java, Node.js, Rust) Strong scripting and automation skills (Bash, Python, PowerShell) Understanding of software engineering best practices and testing methodologies Core Observability & OpenTelemetry Experience in observability, monitoring, and distributed systems Hands-on experience with OpenTelemetry ecosystem, including SDKs, APIs, and specifications Proficiency with OpenTelemetry Collector configuration, processors, exporters, and receivers Strong understanding of telemetry data models, semantic conventions, and instrumentation best practices Preferred Qualifications (Exceptional Candidates) AI & Agentic Frameworks Understanding of Large Language Models (LLMs) and their application in DevOps Knowledge of vector databases, embeddings, and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) Experience with AI/ML model deployment and monitoring in production environments Leadership & Communication Strong technical writing and documentation skills Ability to present complex technical concepts to diverse stakeholders A passion for knowledge sharing Key Competencies Systems thinking and ability to design holistic observability solutions Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills for complex distributed systems Curiosity about emerging technologies, particularly AI applications in operations Adaptability to rapidly evolving cloud-native and observability technologies Collaborative mindset with focus on enabling developer productivity and system reliability What to know before you apply: This role will require being in the Denver office three days per week and up to 20% travel within the United States. Focused is unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of the employment Visa process at this time. The Denver base salary range for this role is $130,000 - $180,000.

Lead full stack software projects with focus on backend and mobile UIs, mentoring developers and guiding architecture. | Hands-on full stack engineer with deep Swift and Kotlin expertise, TDD, pairing, and agile experience. | Who we are: At Focused, we move quickly to deliver quality software that achieves client outcomes and meets their customer's needs. We strategically partner with our clients to leverage our expertise in design and software, while our clients bring their own domain expertise. We work with a variety of clients from different industries, collaborating as we get new products to market, modernizing legacy systems, or helping teams learn the skills they need to be successful. Our values: Listen first • We are experts in product practices but life long learners in the domain of our customers. We research, collaborate, and understand. Learn why • We ask questions and talk to users to understand problem spaces, objectives, and goals, which allows us to deeply invest and drive towards the outcomes of our clients. Love your craft • We love diving into a variety of domains and solving problems. We take pride in delivering value, in communicating progress, and guiding our clients to success. At Focused, our Engineers are both practitioners and experts in their craft. This role would play a crucial role in shaping and implementing engineering best practices and ensuring the successful delivery of complex software projects. With clients, we develop trust and influence - we are unintimidated and unintimidating. With colleagues, we set the standard for how we deliver success for clients. What would you be doing? Writing lots of code Lead teams through end-to-end delivery across the stack, from backend services to modern web UIs. Pair program daily with teammates and clients to share knowledge, improve code quality, and grow together. Practice TDD and continuous refactoring to ensure code is reliable, maintainable, and understandable. Guide architecture decisions to support scalability, observability, and performance. Collaborate closely with designers, product managers, and stakeholders to continuously deliver valuable software. Coach developers on the team through pairing, mentoring, and modeling healthy engineering culture. Influence technical direction beyond the team, working across client orgs and Focused’s internal practices to share lessons, shape approaches, and raise the collective bar. Stay curious through experimenting with new patterns in the GenAI space, share what works (and what doesn’t), and help evolve how we build AI-powered software. We are excited about you, because you: You’re a hands-on, full stack engineer with a strong track record of delivering software in collaborative, agile environments. You've worked with native iOS and Android development (Swift/Kotlin), and have an interest in learning agentic AI tooling as it becomes more relevant to mobile development. You believe that code quality matters, and that TDD and pairing help build better systems and stronger teams. You’ve worked across multiple languages or frameworks and have deep expertise in Swift and Kotlin. You’re excited about what’s happening in the AI space but stay focused on delivering value. You have experience navigating complex organizations, building bridges across functions, and helping teams adopt modern development practices. You’re as comfortable in the code as you are in a client meeting and can translate technical risks and wins into language anyone can understand. You love to share what you’re learning and make the team around you better. If you had worked at Focused over the last 3 months you may have: Paired with a teammate to build a native iOS feature using Swift and SwiftUI Helped design an architecture that modernizes a legacy mobile app's data layer for offline-first support Refactored a flaky test suite to support continuous delivery with confidence Built and deployed a new Android MVP feature using Kotlin and Jetpack Compose Facilitated an architecture spike to evaluate cross-platform code-sharing options between iOS and Android Contributed a new section to our internal playbook on using Claude and Codex for mobile development Helped write this job req What to know before you apply: This role will require being in the Denver office three days per week and up to 20% travel within the United States. Focused is unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of the employment Visa process at this time. The Denver base salary range for this role is $120,000 - $175,000.