Tech Lead, Infra (Infra Core)

Who We Are Is What We Do. Deel is the all-in-one payroll and HR platform for global teams. Our vision is to unlock global opportunity for every person, team, and business. Built for the way the world works today, Deel combines HRIS, payroll, compliance, benefits, performance, and equipment management into one seamless platform. With AI-powered tools and a fully owned payroll infrastructure, Deel supports every worker type in 150+ countries—helping businesses scale smarter, faster, and more compliantly. Among the largest globally distributed companies in the world, our team of 7,000 spans more than 100 countries, speaks 74 languages, and brings a connected and dynamic culture that drives continuous learning and innovation for our customers. Why should you be part of our success story? As the fastest-growing Software as a Service (SaaS) company in history, Deel is transforming how global talent connects with world-class companies – breaking down borders that have traditionally limited both hiring and career opportunities. We're not just building software; we're creating the infrastructure for the future of work, enabling a more diverse and inclusive global economy. In 2024 alone, we paid $11.2 billion to workers in nearly 100 currencies and provided healthcare and benefits to workers in 109 countries—ensuring people get paid and protected, no matter where they are. Our momentum is reflected in our achievements and customer satisfaction: CNBC Disruptor 50, Forbes Cloud 100, Deloitte Fast 500, and repeated recognition on Y Combinator's top companies list – all while maintaining a 4.83 average rating from 15,000 reviews across G2, Trustpilot, Captera, Apple and Google. Your experience at Deel will be a career accelerator. At the forefront of the global work revolution, you'll tackle complex challenges that impact millions of people's working lives. With our momentum—backed by a $17.3 billion valuation and $1 B in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) in just over five years—you'll drive meaningful impact while building expertise that makes you a sought-after leader in the transformation of global work. About The Role 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. How We Build At Deel As a hyper-growth company, new initiatives and shifting priorities are the norm here. This is not an environment for "maintenance-mode" engineering. We are builders. Our philosophy is simple: identify the biggest bottleneck, build a robust solution, ship it, and immediately move on to tackle the next massive problem. If you thrive in a high-velocity environment where your work has an immediate, wide-scale impact, you'll feel right at home. The challenges ahead 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. These are only a glimpse of all the challenges ahead. What We're Looking For 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. Nice to have Experience with internal developer platforms (IDP), developer experience tooling, or self-serve platform engineering. (While this role is primarily infrastructure-focused, platform instincts are a strong bonus.) What Makes You Stand Out Technical depth alone isn't enough for