Platform Support & Operations Team Lead

Kevel is transforming the retail media space with its cutting-edge, AI-driven ad tech infrastructure APIs that power the Retail Media Cloud™. This groundbreaking solution combines the power of AI insights with API-based technology, allowing multi-brand retailers to build dynamic, customizable ad platforms while maintaining full control of their first-party data. With Kevel, retailers can deliver personalized shopper experiences, optimize ad targeting, and unlock predictive insights to stay ahead in an ever-evolving market.

JOB OVERVIEW: We are building a new Platform Support Team to serve as the dedicated first line of engineering support for our internal platform and we're looking for a leader to build it from the ground up. This team acts as the primary point of contact for internal engineering squads after customer-facing Technical Support, serving as the engineering escalation point for customer-facing support teams and as first responder for platform alerts.

As the Platform Support & Operations Team Lead, you will define, build, and lead this new function. You'll hire and develop a team of support and operations engineers, establish the processes and standards that make the team effective. Your leadership will help reduce toil across our 70-person engineering organization, enabling smaller, AI-augmented squads to focus on high-impact product and platform work. This is a player-coach role: in the near term you'll be hands-on alongside your team - doing triage, responding to incidents, and building runbooks yourself - while simultaneously establishing the processes and standards that make the function sustainable.

This is a high-visibility leadership role with real ownership: you'll directly improve platform stability and engineer productivity through hands-on operational work. In the near term, the team provides centralized support and operations. Over time, under your leadership, it will become the primary first-tier on-call engineering function for the platform (with domain squads retaining higher-tier on-call for complex issues).

LOCATION: REMOTE - HUNGARY, SPAIN, OR PORTUGAL. This position is 100% remote. Applicants located anywhere within Hungary, Spain or Portugal are encouraged to apply. Applicants must be legally eligible to work within one of these countries.

PAY TRANSPARENCY: Kevel uses external, third-party market data to determine compensation for all open positions. Our compensation philosophy is based on the candidate’s specific working locationand experience level. This means that we will take a no negotiation approach in our recruitment and offer processes. We believe this is an important step in living our value of embracing diversity while underlining our commitment to fair, equitable and inclusive pay practices. The recruiter is happy to share the salary range based on your location and where you reside.

All compensation packages include the additional benefits as described in the 'Why you'll love working with us' section below. We also have a transparent ‘Total Rewards Philosophy’ we’d be happy to share with you which describes our overall approach to compensation and benefits in full detail! Our recruitment team can share more about this with you in an initial phone interview and will be happy to answer any questions you have related to compensation at Kevel!

WHAT YOU'LL ACCOMPLISH:

Team Building & Leadership

• Hire, onboard, and develop an initial team of two Platform Support & Operations Engineers, defining role expectations and career growth paths.
• Define the team's operating model, priorities, and ways of working, and evolve them as the function matures.
• Coach and mentor team members on troubleshooting, incident response, and communication skills; conduct regular 1:1s and performance conversations.
• Foster a culture of operational excellence, psychological safety, and sustainable pace - including designing a fair, sustainable on-call rotation.

Support Operations & Process Design

• Establish and own the team's support and triage processes: intake, prioritization, SLAs, escalation paths, and handoffs with domain squads and customer-facing Technical Support.
• Define the standards for runbooks, documentation, and knowledge management, ensuring recurring issues are solved once and escalated less often over time.
• Build the operating rhythm for first-tier on-call, including coverage models, escalation criteria, and post-incident review practices. This includes defining weekend and holiday coverage - in the near term, the team's weekday coverage spans most of the 24-hour day via globally distributed shifts; weekend and holiday coverage will be defined collaboratively with your manager as the team ramps.
• Personally handle triage, incident response, and runbook development alongside your ICs, especially during the team's early ramp - this is a working lead role, not a coordination-only one.

Incident Management & Reliability

• Own the incident management function for first-tier response - ensure rapid triage, clear communication during incidents, and high-quality post-mortems that drive real improvements.
• Define, track, and report on support and reliability metrics (MTTR, escalation volume, trends, root causes) to keep management informed of trends and capacity needs.
• Lead the hands on work for tuning thresholds, improving alert specificity, and automating known-safe responses so domain engineers are only paged when genuinely needed.

Collaboration & Continuous Improvement

• Partner with platform engineering squad leads to surface recurring issues, advocate for preventative fixes, and follow through on resolution.
• Champion the team's evolution toward proactive, SRE-aligned practices, including automation, self-service tooling, and AI-augmented triage.
• Gather and synthesize feedback from internal teams to continuously improve platform usability and reliability.

SKILLS YOU'LL BRING WITH YOU:

Must haves:

• 5+ years of experience in technical support, operations, SRE, or platform engineering roles, including 2+ years leading or managing a technical team (formal management or sustained tech lead experience). Comfortable remaining hands-on technically while building the management layer around you.
• Proven experience building or scaling a support, operations, or SRE function - designing processes, defining metrics, and establishing on-call practices.
• Strong technical foundation in distributed systems, cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP), Kubernetes, databases, or similar modern platforms - enough depth to guide triage, review runbooks, and earn credibility with engineers.
• Experience with incident management practices, including running post-mortems and driving follow-through on action items.
• Familiarity with monitoring and observability tools (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, etc.) and how to use them to make better triage and alert tuning decisions.
• Clear communicator who can explain operational problems and their impact to engineers and managers alike.
• A coaching mindset with a track record of developing engineers and building healthy team cultures.

*Important Note: This role participates in a rotating on-call schedule covering both primary and backup coverage outside standard business hours, approximately 2 - 4 days per month. On-call participation is compensated in addition to base salary, in line with applicable local law and Kevel's compensation practices in your country. Specific rates and rotation details are confirmed in your offer and employment contract.

Nice to Haves:

• Experience standing up a brand-new team or function in a high-growth startup or scaling engineering organization.
• Background spanning both support engineering and operations/SRE.
• Experience leveraging AI/ML tools for triage, automation, or support workflows - or strong interest in leading a team that does.
• Experience creating or maintaining internal developer platforms.
• Knowledge of Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, etc.) and CI/CD practices.

WHY YOU'LL LOVE WORKING WITH US:

• Fully Remote Team: We are a 100% remote work environment with employees located around the world. You are welcome to work from home, one of our offices, a WeWork office, or an equivalent co-working space.
• Flexible Working Hours: We understand our employees have their own lives, responsibilities and working preferences. We trust our employees to communicate with their managers, and work when they work best.
• Comprehensive Health Benefits - Kevel provides 100% employer paid medical benefits for our employees and their children, plus comprehensive, affordable coverage for all other dependents.
• Savings opportunity for the Future: Kevel offers retirement savings plans with employer contributions so employees can save toward future financial objectives.
• Rest and Relaxation: Unlimited personal time off - and we mean it! We trust our employees to take the time they need, whenever they need it. We also offer Paid Holidays + a Kevel Holiday Break (from 12/24 - 1/1 every year!)
• Kevelfest: Our annual corporate retreat! The entire Kevel team gets together once a year for a four - day in - person event filled with collaboration, team building, celebration and fun!
• Home Office Stipend: You’ll receive a new windows or mac machine (your choice) + a $500 home office allowance to purchase what you need to set up your work space properly!
• Parental Leave Support: We support all parents with salary continuation and benefits when our employees are growing their families.
• Free press benefits: Kevel believes all employees should have access to legitimate news sources. You’ll receive a $300 annual allowance to subscribe to the news source of your choice.
• You’ll work with an award winning team! We’ve won numerous Best Places to Work Awards for several years and counting! We’ve also won many awards for our Innovation, Business Intelligence, and our best-in-class products (Software of the Year, Cloud Company of the Year, Best Ad Tech and API Innovator).
• Full transparency. We embrace transparency and encourage you to read more about what we value through ourCompany Constitution and Employee Bill of Rights,ourAbout Kevel page, andCareers Page.

Hiring Guidelines by Country: Kevel hires new team members in countries around the world. Some roles may carry specific location-based eligibility requirements. Our Recruitment Team will share the specific benefits that are available in your location, and can help answer any questions about location specific eligibility requirements and benefits after the recruitment process begins.

ABOUT KEVEL

Kevel (previously Adzerk) offers the infrastructure APIs needed to quickly build custom ad platforms for sponsored listings, internal promotions, native ads, and more. We are committed to helping publishers drive new revenue and take back the Internet from ad tech giants like Google, Amazon, and Facebook. Kevel was founded in 2010 in Durham, North Carolina. We embrace remote working culture with our entire team being spread across the United States, United Kingdom, Portugal and Singapore! Kevel is proud to be an inclusive workplace with one goal in common - we want to make the internet a better place.

ALL APPLICANTS ARE WELCOME, EXACTLY AS YOU ARE

We’re building a global community - one that’s safe for people of all backgrounds and walks of life. Our policies and way of working are guided by our core values of inclusivity, trust, empathy, and respect. We know we have more work to do, but firmly believe that our work is at its best when everyone feels free to be their most authentic selves. Kevel is an equal opportunity employer, and we’re proud of our ongoing efforts and commitment to creating a diverse, inclusive, and transparent workplace where everyone feels respected, heard, safe and accepted. At Kevel, we embrace our differences and consider diversity a superpower that drives the success of our organization. Individuals seeking employment at Kevel are considered without regard to race, color, religion, national origin, age, sex, gender, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, marital status, medical condition, ancestry, disability, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable law.