Team Lead - Infrastructure & Core Services

About The Position

Pixellot's infrastructure powers millions of live sports events globally - from video ingestion at remote venues to real-time streaming delivery. We're looking for a hands-on Team Lead to own the reliability, scalability, and operational excellence of our cloud platform and core backend services (event lifecycle orchestration, streaming configuration, control plane).

This is a high-impact role where you'll lead a team of multi-disciplinary engineers (infrastructure + backend), stay deeply technical, and operate as the execution arm of the Infrastructure Director. You'll own day-to-day delivery, incident response, and team growth - while the Director focuses on strategy, cross-domain alignment, and removing organizational blockers.

You'll join Pixellot during an AI-first transformation and autonomous pod operating model shift. Your team enables product teams to ship independently through self-service platforms (GitOps, observability, cost dashboards) - making infrastructure a multiplier, not a bottleneck.

As part of your role, you will:

Own the team's delivery lifecycle; drive predictable shipping cadence while managing technical debt and ensuring velocity never comes at the expense of stability.
Mentor and coach engineers at all levels, fostering professional growth, conducting performance reviews, and building a cohesive, psychologically safe team environment.
Champion a culture of craftsmanship; establish high standards for code quality, testing, monitoring, and incident response, ensuring systems are robust, secure, and reliable.
Guide the architectural vision and technical decision-making of the team, balancing immediate product needs with long-term system health and scalability.
Build and operate self-service platforms (GitOps CI/CD, observability dashboards, cost attribution) so product teams deploy, monitor, and optimize without your team becoming a bottleneck.
Jump into architecture reviews, debug critical incidents, validate designs, and mentor through code/config reviews—you're a player-coach, not a pure manager.
Collaborate with product teams to unblock their delivery; translate technical constraints into business language for stakeholders; build trust through transparency and reliable execution.
Champion AI-first practices across the team; use AI tools (Copilot, Claude) to speed up development, debugging, documentation, and operational workflows; experiment with AI-powered automation.
Requirements
5+ years in infrastructure, DevOps, or backend engineering, with at least 2+ years leading teams (managing 3+ engineers, ideally as manager or tech lead).
Deep Kubernetes expertise - Production experience with EKS/GKE/AKS, GitOps (ArgoCD/Flux), service mesh, resource management, and multi-tenant cluster operations.
Strong backend engineering background - Experience building/operating microservices in production (Go/Python/Java/Node.js), API design, message queues (RabbitMQ/Kafka), and database performance (MongoDB/PostgreSQL/MySQL).
Operational excellence mindset - Proven track record running incident response, establishing SLOs, writing runbooks, and building observability (Prometheus/Grafana/Datadog/Coralogix).
People leadership skills - You've hired, mentored, and grown engineers; conducted performance reviews; had difficult conversations; and built high-trust, high-performing teams.
Ownership mentality - You own outcomes end-to-end (not just tasks), take accountability without deflecting blame, and escalate only when truly blocked.
Thrives in ambiguity - You can operate with incomplete information, define problems when requirements are unclear, and deliver results in fast-moving, chaotic environments.
Strong communication skills – You translate technical complexity into business impact for non-technical stakeholders and build trust through transparency.
AI-first mindset (using AI tools like Copilot/Claude to accelerate engineering delivery and operational workflows)

Bonus points if you have:

Video streaming infrastructure experience (HLS, RTMP, CDN optimization, live video pipelines)
AWS expertise (EC2, S3, CloudFront, RDS, IAM, networking/VPC design, cost optimization)
FinOps or cost optimization experience (cost attribution, right-sizing, reserved instances, storage lifecycle policies)
Platform engineering background (building self-service developer platforms, internal tooling, golden paths)
High-scale operations (managing infrastructure serving millions of daily users or events)
Startup or high-growth environment (thrives in fast-paced, ambiguous, resource-constrained settings)
Why You'll Love Working Here
Real Impact: Your infrastructure decisions directly affect millions of parents watching Friday night games, coaches gaining competitive advantage, and venues monetizing content globally.
Technical Challenges: Solve real-time video at global scale, Kubernetes multi-tenancy, event orchestration complexity, and CDN delivery optimization—world-class problems that few companies face.
Ownership & Growth: Run your domain with high autonomy; shape platform strategy with the Director; grow into senior leadership (Director track) as the team scales.
AI-First Culture: Use cutting-edge AI tools (Copilot, Claude) daily to accelerate delivery; experiment with AI-powered ops workflows; help 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