Infrastructure Tech Lead — Infra Core

Deel, Inc.

Job Overview

Location

EMEA

Job Type

Full-time

Full Job Description

📋 Description

• Lead the technical direction of the Infra Core team as a staff-level engineer with no direct people management, while remaining deeply hands-on in architecture, code, and infrastructure design.
• Build and own the control plane, tooling, and infrastructure primitives that hundreds of Deel engineers rely on daily to deploy, observe, and scale services across 150+ countries.
• Drive the architectural evolution of Deel’s Kubernetes ecosystem, designing patterns for deploying, scaling, and managing hundreds of microservices in a globally distributed environment.
• Eliminate operational toil by treating internal infrastructure support requests as engineering problems—automating secure service provisioning, database setup, environment registration, and deployment workflows to enable teams to go from approved to Prod in a single day.
• Lead massive architectural transitions at the edge routing layer, including replacing ingress controller fleets or migrating high-volume backend traffic to centralized API gateways with zero downtime.
• Architect enterprise-scale secrets management systems, eliminating legacy credential injection methods, implementing zero-downtime secret rotation, and enforcing strict boundaries between GitOps configurations and sensitive data.
• Spearhead the modernization of Deel’s observability stack by deprecating legacy tracing systems, unifying logging and metrics under OpenTelemetry standards across hundreds of microservices, and building high-volume, reliable logging pipelines.
• Design and deploy real-time and agentic infrastructure capabilities, including enterprise-grade WebSocket infrastructure and native support for event-driven and AI-agentic workloads.
• Own end-to-end delivery of complex infrastructure projects: define roadmaps, align stakeholders, hit milestones, and ship high-impact solutions without a dedicated Product Manager.
• Serve as the primary escalation point during critical production incidents, resolving systemic issues while simultaneously building automation to prevent recurrence.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with DevOps, DBA, InfoSec, and product engineering teams to resolve multi-team technical challenges and align infrastructure strategy with organizational goals.
• Represent the infrastructure domain in architecture reviews, ensuring scalable, secure, and maintainable designs are adopted across engineering.
• Operate in a hyper-growth environment where priorities shift rapidly—focus on identifying and solving the biggest bottlenecks, shipping solutions quickly, and immediately moving to the next high-impact problem.
• Maintain deep technical proficiency in production-grade systems while mentoring engineers, raising team standards, and fostering a culture of ownership and execution.
• Work fully remotely as part of a highly autonomous, distributed team of five engineers that shapes its own roadmap and owns foundational infrastructure impacting every team at Deel.
• Balance strategic vision with tactical execution, making tough architectural decisions under ambiguity, documenting tradeoffs clearly, and prioritizing relentless delivery over perfection.

🎯 Requirements

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 5+ years focused on infrastructure (AWS/GCP, Kubernetes, Helm, GitOps, CNCF landscape)
• Expertise in writing production-grade code in Node.js, JavaScript/TypeScript, Go, or Python
• 2+ years of experience acting as a technical lead, mentoring engineers, and driving projects with distributed, cross-functional teams across multiple time zones
• Proven experience designing high-performance, highly available distributed systems with deep familiarity with message brokers (NATS, Kafka) and event-driven architectures
• Experience designing and operating systems that extend Kubernetes—building operators, custom controllers, or platform primitives using Kubernetes APIs
• Solid operational experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL/MySQL) in the context of modern scalable platforms
• Demonstrated track record of delivering complex infrastructure projects from inception to production, including roadmap definition, stakeholder alignment, milestone execution, and successful shipping
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills to articulate complex architectural tradeoffs to engineers and leadership
• Strong bias for action: ability to make decisions, document choices, and ship solutions without waiting for perfect conditions

🏖️ Benefits

• Stock grant opportunities dependent on role, employment status, and location
• Additional perks and benefits based on employment status and country
• Flexibility of remote work, including optional WeWork access

Skills & Technologies

Python

JavaScript

TypeScript

Node.js

PostgreSQL

DevOps

Senior

Remote

Degree Required

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Deel, Inc.

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About Deel, Inc.

Deel is a San Francisco-based payroll and compliance platform that enables businesses to hire, pay, and manage contractors and employees in over 150 countries. It automates onboarding, localized contracts, tax filings, and payments while ensuring adherence to local labor laws. The cloud software integrates with HR and accounting systems, offers visa and immigration support, and provides employer-of-record services for companies without local entities. Founded in 2019, Deel serves thousands of remote-first and distributed organizations, helping them scale global teams quickly and reduce administrative overhead associated with international employment.

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