Infrastructure Tech Lead, Deel

• If you thrive in a high-velocity environment where your work has an immediate, wide-scale impact, you'll feel right at home
• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 5+ years specifically focused on infrastructure (AWS/GCP, Kubernetes, Helm, GitOps, CNCF landscape)
• Programming Expertise: Expertise in writing production-grade code in Node.js, JavaScript/TypeScript, Go, or Python
• Technical Leadership: 2+ years of experience acting as a technical lead, mentoring engineers, and successfully driving projects with distributed, cross-functional teams across multiple time zones (this is a player-coach role, no direct HR management)
• Distributed Systems & Event-Driven Architectures: Proven experience designing high-performance, highly available distributed systems. You should have deep familiarity with message brokers (NATS, Kafka) and building event-driven architectures on top of them
• Kubernetes Mastery: Experience designing and operating systems that extend Kubernetes—whether by building operators and controllers, integrating and customizing third-party tools, or architecting custom platform primitives on top of Kubernetes APIs
• Database Familiarity: Solid operational experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL/MySQL), particularly around how they integrate and scale within a modern platform
• A track record of delivery: You have taken complex infrastructure projects from inception to delivery—writing the roadmap, aligning stakeholders, hitting milestones, and successfully shipping
• Excellent Communication: Strong written and verbal communication skills. You can articulate complex architectural tradeoffs clearly to both product engineers and leadership
• A bias for action: You make the tough calls, document your decisions, and never let perfect become the enemy of good
• Technical depth alone isn't enough for this role. The person who will thrive here can hold a strong technical vision, align a team behind it, and execute; even through ambiguity or disagreement
• You have a reputation for shipping things that are hard to ship. You know how to keep a project moving without losing the room, and you strongly prioritize relentless execution over endless debate

Desirable

• We're looking for an Infrastructure Tech Lead to join our Infra Core team at Deel
• This is a staff-level, technical leadership role (with no direct people management)
• You will be the most senior technical voice on a team of four to five engineers, setting the technical direction while doing real, hands-on work in equal measure
• In this role, technical depth is not optional
• You will stay close to the architecture, code, and infrastructure while simultaneously shaping the roadmap and raising the team's bar
• Your primary focus is the application layer: how services are built, observed, and scaled across the organization
• You will be building the control plane, tooling, and infrastructure primitives that hundreds of Deel engineers depend on every day
• Engineering-Led Product Ownership: We do not have a Product Manager. The shaping of what the team works on, prioritizing the roadmap, and determining how to tangibly improve developers' lives at Deel is 100% driven by you and the team
• Architectural Impact: You will design patterns and infrastructure for a rapidly growing Kubernetes ecosystem, shaping how hundreds of microservices are built, deployed, and efficiently scaled globally
• Expert Troubleshooting & Noise Reduction: You are the ultimate escalation point during critical production incidents. We handle thousands of internal support and infrastructure requests every quarter—you won't just help answer them; you will treat that toil as an engineering problem and build the automation required to eliminate it
• Service Provisioning & Developer Experience: Transform how a new service goes from approved to running. You'll automate secure provisioning, database setups, and environment registrations so teams can deploy to Dev, Demo, Prod on the exact same day without Infra becoming a bottleneck
• Edge Routing & Traffic Management: Drive massive architectural shifts at the routing layer. You will tackle projects equivalent in scale and complexity to replacing entire ingress controller fleets or migrating massive backend traffic volumes to centralized API gateways without dropping requests
• Secrets Management & Infrastructure Security: Lead enterprise-scale secrets management and security posture improvements. You will architect zero-downtime secret rotation, eliminate legacy credential injection methods, and enforce strict boundaries between sensitive data and GitOps-driven configurations
• Application Observability at Scale: Spearhead the evolution of our observability stack. You will deprecate legacy tracing systems, drive the adoption of unified OpenTelemetry standards across hundreds of microservices, and build high-volume logging pipelines that give teams the exact signals they need
• Real-time & Agentic Infrastructure: Architect and deploy new platform capabilities, from enterprise-scale real-time WebSocket infrastructure to ensuring our platform natively and efficiently supports the massive influx of event-driven and AI-agentic workloads
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with DevOps, DBA, InfoSec, and product engineering teams to align on organizational goals. You will represent the infrastructure domain in architectural conversations, resolving complex multi-team technical challenges and driving shared objectives