DevOps & Platform Engineering Team Lead

Description Pixellot's infrastructure is the backbone behind millions of live sports events worldwide, enabling seamless experiences from the initial video capture at remote venues to delivering real-time streams and leveraging machine learning for monetization. In this pivotal position, the DevOps & Platform Engineering Team Lead will take charge of ensuring the reliability, scalability, and operational excellence of the company's cloud platform. This role involves leading a small, high-impact team of DevOps and platform engineers - combining deep infrastructure ownership with platform thinking - building self-service tools and infrastructure that enable R&D teams to move fast and independently. As part of your role, you will: Team Leadership & Growth - Mentor engineers, conduct performance reviews, and build a high-trust collaborative team. Leverage AI to accelerate development and delivery - leverage industry leading tools and our company’s agentic concepts to speed up development and operational workflows. Operational Excellence - Set high standards for code quality, monitoring, and incident response; ensure systems are robust and secure. Technical Direction - Guide architectural decisions, balancing immediate product needs with long-term scalability. Enable Autonomous Execution - Build self-service platforms (GitOps, observability, cost dashboards) so product teams deploy and monitor independently. Stay Hands-On - 60%+ of your time is hands-on: lead architecture reviews, debug critical incidents, and mentor through code and config reviews - you're a player-coach. Requirements 5+ years in infrastructure or DevOps engineering, with at least 2+ years leading teams (managing 3+ engineers, as manager or tech lead). Strong development background - The team builds tools for developers; a coding mindset is essential (Python, Go, Node.js or similar). Deep Kubernetes expertise - Production experience with EKS and/or GKE, GitOps (ArgoCD/Flux), service mesh, resource management, and multi-tenant cluster operations. GitOps & CI/CD mastery - Deep hands-on with ArgoCD or Flux, kustomize/Helm, rollout strategies, deployment safety, change ownership, and audit trails. AWS platform depth - EC2, EKS, S3, CloudFront, IAM/IRSA, VPC networking, RDS, cost optimization levers. Observability mindset - Proven experience building and operating monitoring stacks (Prometheus/Grafana/Datadog/Coralogix); SLO-driven thinking, actionable alerting, runbook culture. AI-first mindset - Actively uses AI tools (Copilot, Claude) to accelerate development and ops workflows. Platform engineering background - Experience building self-service developer platforms, golden paths, and internal tooling that reduces team dependency on DevOps. People leadership skills - You've hired, mentored, and grown engineers; conducted performance reviews; and built high-trust, high-performing teams. Ownership & Communication - own outcomes end-to-end, escalate only when truly blocked, and translate infrastructure complexity into business impact. Bonus points if you have: GCP experience (advantage) - GKE, GCS, Cloud Run, or hybrid multi-cloud operations. Video streaming infrastructure - HLS, RTMP, CDN optimization, live video pipelines. FinOps / cost optimization - Cost attribution, right-sizing, storage lifecycle policies, etc. Why You'll Love Working Here Real Impact: your decisions affect millions of fans, coaches, and venues globally. Unique challenges at scale: real-time video, K8S and CDN optimizations, from HW to SW. Ownership & Growth: high autonomy, influence platform strategy, clear path to leadership. AI-First Culture: cutting-edge AI tools, define how Pixellot leverages AI across engineering. Join the Team! If you're excited to lead a team that powers live sports globally - combining infrastructure reliability, backend services, and platform thinking to enable autonomous product delivery - we'd love to hear from you.