Focused

Develop end-to-end software features, collaborate with clients, and implement engineering best practices including GenAI experimentation. | Hands-on full-stack engineer proficient in Python or JavaScript with cloud deployment experience, strong communication, and commitment to TDD and pair programming. | 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 Delivering features end to end across the stack, from backend services and APIs 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. Build APIs with FastAPI, Express, or similar, with clear schemas and validation using tools like Pydantic, JSON Schema, or zod. Containerize, deploy, and monitor apps in the cloud using Docker, CI/CD pipelines, and observability tools like Honeycomb or Datadog. Collaborate closely with designers, product managers, and stakeholders to continuously deliver valuable software. Help define metrics and run experiments, including A/B tests, so we know what's actually working. 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're proficient in Python and/or JS/TypeScript (Ruby or similar works too) and have solid OOP and design fundamentals. You understand async/await and the event loop as well as thread-based concurrency, and you know when to use which. You believe that code quality matters, and that TDD and pairing help build better systems and stronger teams. You're comfortable with unit and integration tests, regression suites, and CI gates. You know your REST fundamentals (HTTP verbs, status codes, CORS) and have modeled data with ORMs like SQLAlchemy, Django ORM, ActiveRecord, or Prisma. You can jump into an existing React, Vue, or Svelte frontend and ship changes, with or without a coding agent. You've deployed containerized apps to a cloud provider and have a working understanding of IAM, scaling, logging, and observability. You've worked directly with clients or product stakeholders and can explain technical work in language anyone can understand. You're excited about what's happening in the AI space but stay focused on delivering value. You love to share what you're learning and make the team around you better. Nice to have: Exposure to LLM APIs or agent frameworks Experience building AI-enabled applications with LangChain and LLMs that deliver production-ready outcomes for clients Hands-on experience with LangChain, LangGraph, and LangSmith If you had worked at Focused over the last 3 months you may have: Paired with a teammate to build a FastAPI service with Pydantic validation and solid test coverage Tracked down and fixed a race condition in an async background worker Refactored a flaky test suite to support continuous delivery with confidence Set up Docker Compose for a client team so new devs could get running on day one Added tracing in Honeycomb that helped a client find and fix a slow endpoint Shipped a React feature in an existing client frontend alongside a coding agent Contributed to our internal playbook on building with LLM APIs Helped write this job req What to know before you apply: This is a contract-to-hire role. It starts with an 8 week program followed by a one month evaluation period, for a total of about 3 months. During the program, you'll be required to earn the LangChain Certified Agent Engineer certification and the Claude Architect certificate. Focused is unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment visa for this program. This role requires being in our Denver office three days per week. This is an hourly position for the duration of the contract, with a pay range of $60 to $85 per hour. Final rate will be based on experience and skill level.

Lead technical direction, mentor developers, deliver software, collaborate with stakeholders, and improve processes. | Hands-on full stack engineer with leadership, mentoring, testing, cloud infrastructure, 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. Set the technical direction for client engagements and be the go-to escalation point when things get tricky. Pair program daily with teammates and clients to share knowledge, improve code quality, and grow together. Practice TDD and continuous refactoring, and own the testing strategy for the codebase, including deciding what not to test. Guide architecture decisions to support scalability, observability, and performance, including deployment, IAM, and observability design for containerized systems. Collaborate closely with designers, product managers, and stakeholders to continuously deliver valuable software. Map business value to engineering effort so clients can make good tradeoffs. Coach developers on the team through pairing, mentoring, and modeling healthy engineering culture. Drive incremental process improvement through retros and day to day feedback. 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 have experience leading engineering teams and feel confident mentoring and supporting other developers. You're proficient in Python and/or JS/TypeScript (Ruby or similar works too), and you have real opinions on repo layout, dependency management, config, and tooling that you can back up. You've diagnosed and fixed real concurrency problems in production, whether async/await or thread-based. You believe that code quality matters, and that TDD and pairing help build better systems and stronger teams. You've owned a testing strategy, from unit and integration tests to regression suites and CI gates. You've designed the deployment, IAM model, or observability for a containerized system on a cloud provider, and you've taken a system through a scaling inflection. You've worked across a range of company sizes, from startups to enterprise, and have experience navigating complex organizations, building bridges across functions, and helping teams adopt modern development practices. You know how to read the room, when to push and when to hold back, and you can handle difficult stakeholders without losing the relationship. You're proactive. You see problems coming and raise them before they turn into fires. 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're excited about what's happening in the AI space but stay focused on delivering value. You love to share what you're learning and make the team around you better. Nice to have: Exposure to LLM APIs or agent frameworks Experience building AI-enabled applications with LangChain and LLMs that deliver production-ready outcomes for clients Deep expertise in LangChain, LangGraph, and LangSmith An understanding of how to architect AI-native systems responsibly and effectively If you had worked at Focused over the last 3 months you may have: Led a team through building and launching a new client product, from first commit to production Tracked down a deadlock in a production service and put guardrails in place so it wouldn't happen again Designed the IAM model and observability setup for a client's move to containers Helped a client's platform handle a big jump in traffic without missing a beat Stepped in as the escalation point when a client's priorities shifted mid-engagement and got everyone aligned on a new plan Ran a retro that changed how the team approaches code review Mentored a Senior Engineer through setting technical direction on a project for the first time Helped write this job req What to know before you apply: This is a contract-to-hire role. It starts with an 8 week program followed by a one month evaluation period, for a total of about 3 months. During the program, you'll be required to earn the LangChain Certified Agent Engineer certification and the Claude Architect certificate. Focused is unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment visa for this program. This role requires being in our Denver office three days per week. This is an hourly position for the duration of the contract, with a pay range of $85 to $100 per hour. Final rate will be based on experience and skill level.

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.