Deel is a leading all-in-one payroll and HR platform for global teams, dedicated to unlocking global opportunity for every person and business. As the fastest-growing SaaS company in history, Deel is transforming how global talent connects with world-class companies, breaking down traditional hiring and career barriers. The company has achieved significant milestones, including $17.3 billion valuation and $1 billion in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), while maintaining high customer satisfaction.
The Giger team, which this role leads, is responsible for building and maintaining Deel's powerful internal sandbox system. This platform enables engineers to develop, test, and deploy faster by spinning up fully functional, production-like environments in minutes, complete with real databases, services, and queues. Operating the largest Kubernetes cluster at Deel (1000 nodes, 35k pods), the team spins up 300 sandboxes daily for hundreds of engineers across 200+ product teams.
This role sits at the intersection of platform engineering and developer experience, building the control plane, tooling, and infrastructure primitives that hundreds of Deel engineers depend on daily. The Team Lead will drive the technical vision for the developer sandbox platform, mentor a globally distributed team of 6-8 engineers, and own the architecture and execution of this strategically important internal product. Technical depth is crucial, requiring hands-on engagement with architecture, code, and infrastructure while shaping the roadmap and fostering team growth.
Requirements
- 10+ years of professional software engineering experience with expertise in Node.js, JavaScript/TypeScript or Go/Python
- 5+ years of experience in infrastructure: AWS/GCP, Kubernetes, Helm, GitOps, CNCF landscape – not only using it but setting it up and maintaining at scale
- 3+ years of experience managing and mentoring engineers, with a proven ability to lead cross-functional distributed teams of 6+ people across multiple timezones
- Experience with Postgres/MySQL
- Experience with Nats/Kafka and building event-driven architectures on top of it
- Proven experience in designing and architecting distributed systems with high-performance, scalability, and availability demands
- Experience operating Kubernetes clusters at scale (1000+ nodes, 30k+ pods) – including capacity planning, scheduling, and cost optimization
- Experience designing and operating systems that extend Kubernetes – whether by building operators and controllers, integrating and customizing third-party ones or architecting custom platform primitives on top of Kubernetes APIs.
- Excellent communication skills, both written and verbal
Responsibilities
- Serve as a leader of a strong distributed team driving decision-making, architecture reviews and ensuring day-to-day operations
- Provide mentorship and technical guidance, fostering growth and skill development within the team
- Ensure best practices in development, testing, and deployment, driving innovation and excellence
- Manage on-call shifts and provide support for engineering in dedicated channels
- Own, maintain and ensure stability of the platform for developer sandboxes from control plane to the underlying infrastructure within each sandbox
- Define and drive the technical roadmap for the Giger platform in alignment with organizational goals
- Lead innovation in developer sandbox infrastructure: faster spin-up, smarter resource utilization, better observability, richer self-service capabilities, cell-based multi-region architecture
- Represent Giger in cross-functional discussions, aligning platform capabilities with business objectives
- Make principled architectural decisions on cost, scalability, and reliability at scale
- Manage performance cycles, provide structured feedback, and support the professional growth of team members
- Cultivate a culture of collaboration, inclusion, continuous learning, and engineering excellence
- Champion diversity and foster an environment where all team members thrive
- Hire selectively as the team grows, partner with recruiting on the current open roles
- Work closely with DevOps, DBA and InfoSec teams to align on organizational goals
- Coordinate efforts across teams to drive complex projects and ensure shared objectives are met
- Communicate technical challenges, opportunities, and solutions effectively to stakeholders
- Resolve complex, multi-team technical challenges by fostering collaboration across disciplines
