Tech Lead, Infra (Infra Core)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The challenges ahead include:

• Engineering-Led Product Ownership: 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.
• Service Provisioning & Developer Experience: Transform how a new service goes from approved to running.
• Edge Routing & Traffic Management: Drive massive architectural shifts at the routing layer.
• Secrets Management & Infrastructure Security: Lead enterprise-scale secrets management and security posture improvements.
• Application Observability at Scale: Spearhead the evolution of our observability stack.
• Real-time & Agentic Infrastructure: Architect and deploy new platform capabilities.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Work closely with DevOps, DBA, InfoSec, and product engineering teams to align on organizational goals.

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.
• Distributed Systems & Event-Driven Architectures: Proven experience designing high-performance, highly available distributed systems.
• Kubernetes Mastery: Experience designing and operating systems that extend Kubernetes.
• Database Familiarity: Solid operational experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL/MySQL).
• A track record of delivery: You have taken complex infrastructure projects from inception to delivery.
• Excellent Communication: Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• A bias for action: You make the tough calls, document your decisions, and never let perfect become the enemy of good.

What makes you stand out:

Technical depth alone isn't enough for this role. The person who will thrive here can hold a strong technical vision, align a team behind it, and execute; even through ambiguity or disagreement.

The team Infra Core is a remote, highly autonomous team of five engineers solving the foundational infrastructure problems that affect every team at Deel.

Our workforce deserves fair and competitive pay that meets them where they are. With scalable benefits, rewards, and perks, our total rewards programs reflect our commitment to inclusivity and access for all.

At Deel, we're an equal-opportunity employer that values diversity and positively encourages applications from suitably qualified and eligible candidates regardless of race, religion, sex, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, pregnancy or maternity or other applicable legally protected characteristics.