Team Lead – DevOps & Cloud Infrastructure

At Ematiq, we run real-time algorithmic trading systems on sports prediction markets. Our DevOps team owns the cloud infrastructure those systems run on - AWS, Kubernetes, CI/CD, observability, security and the internal IT agenda. When infrastructure is slow or unreliable, it costs us directly in trading EV and in engineering time.

We are looking for an experienced DevOps engineer who has already led a team and is ready to take ours over. This is not a management-only role: you will keep your hands on Terraform, Kubernetes and AWS while owning the team - its priorities, its delivery and the growth of its people.

The team

You will lead a team of five engineers responsible for the whole infrastructure of the company: AWS across multiple accounts, our Kubernetes platform, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring and logging, security and access management, cloud cost, and the internal IT agenda. The team also holds L2 on-call for production.

DevOps at Ematiq is a support team: its success shows up in how effectively the rest of the company can build and trade.

What this role is

You combine two pillars:

1. Delivery ownership pillar

• Spend time with the other teams - listen and understand what they need to be productive and to deliver their business goals.

• Merge their needs with the platform's own - reliability, security, updates, cost - into one prioritized queue.

• Make tradeoffs explicit and explain in plain language what the team is doing and why.

2. Team Lead pillar

• Lead the engineering team day to day.

• Hiring, onboarding, 1:1s, growth, feedback, performance.

• Own on-call coverage and shift planning; keep the team from drowning in interrupts.

What does leadership mean in Ematiq?

The team is used to a lot of autonomy, and we want to keep it that way. You lead by asking more than telling: you bring context, frame the problem and its constraints, and help the team reach the right technical decisions. You are not the person who designs everything and hands out micro-tasks.

And you build psychological safety: people speak up, challenge ideas (including yours) and treat incidents as learning to be better.

We also expect maturity. If you disagree with a decision, take it up with the people who made it, then stand behind it in front of the team. The team's energy starts with you.

What will be your daily responsibilities?

Delivery leadership

• Own the team's plan: what we do next, what we are not doing, and why.

• Keep delivery predictable: unblock people, chase dependencies, close open loops.

• Treat recurring production pain and manual work as priority backlog input.

• Coordinate incident response and run blameless postmortems that turn into prioritized work.

Team leadership

• Act as Hiring Manager (team composition, on/offboarding).

• Run 1:1s, set development goals, and give clear, timely feedback.

• Help the team make the right technical decisions: ask, frame, and let them own the how.

Hands-on engineering

• Stay technically involved in AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform and CI/CD: review designs and code, take work yourself when it makes sense.

• Drive the infrastructure direction with the team: IaC everywhere it pays off, fewer moving parts, less manual operation.

• Treat security, access and cloud cost as everyday work, not one-off projects.

• Take part in the L2 on-call rotation together with the team.

Required skills & experience

• Several years of hands-on DevOps, SRE or platform engineering in production, including monitoring and incident response.

• Previous experience leading an engineering team: setting priorities, running 1:1s, giving feedback — through questions and trust, not micromanagement.

• Strong AWS background, ideally multi-account, plus Kubernetes in production.

• Solid Infrastructure as Code practice (ideally Terraform) and CI/CD ownership.

• Linux administration, networking and troubleshooting you can do yourself.

• Service mindset toward internal users, combined with the ability to prioritize and explain tradeoffs in plain language.

• Comfort in a fast environment with production pressure and incomplete information, including on-call.

• Ability to use AI tools in day-to-day work while keeping your own engineering judgment.

• Proficiency in Czech/Slovak and fluency in English.

Nice to have

• Experience hiring and growing engineers.

• FinOps and cloud cost optimization.

• Kafka, PostgreSQL or TimescaleDB operations.

• Owning an internal IT agenda: identity, endpoint management, office network.
  

Our core stack

• Cloud: AWS multi-account (EC2, ECS, EKS, Lambda, S3, RDS), Kubernetes

• IaC & CI/CD: Terraform, GitHub Actions, self-hosted GitHub Runners

• Observability: self-hosted Grafana stack (Mimir, Loki), Sentry

• Data layer: PostgreSQL, TimescaleDB, Kafka

• OS & scripting: Linux, Bash, Python 3