Team Lead - Infrastructure & Core Services

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:

• Delivery Management - Own the team's delivery lifecycle; drive predictable shipping cadence while managing technical debt and ensuring velocity never comes at the expense of stability.
• Team Leadership & Growth - Mentor and coach engineers at all levels, fostering professional growth, conducting performance reviews, and building a cohesive, psychologically safe team environment.
• Operational Excellence & Quality - Champion a culture of craftsmanship; establish high standards for code quality, testing, monitoring, and incident response, ensuring systems are robust, secure, and reliable.
• Technical Direction - Guide the architectural vision and technical decision-making of the team, balancing immediate product needs with long-term system health and scalability.
• Enable Autonomous Execution - 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.
• Stay Hands-On - Jump into architecture reviews, debug critical incidents, validate designs, and mentor through code/config reviews - you're a player-coach, not a pure manager.
• Partner Cross-Functionally - Collaborate with product teams to unblock their delivery; translate technical constraints into business language for stakeholders; build trust through transparency and reliable execution.
• Leverage AI to Accelerate Delivery - 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.

You should bring with you:

• 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.