Back-End Infrastructure Engineer

About Deel

Deel is the all-in-one payroll and HR platform for global teams, aiming to unlock global opportunity for every person, team, and business. It 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 one of the largest globally distributed companies, Deel's team of 7,000 spans over 100 countries, speaks 74 languages, and fosters a connected and dynamic culture driving continuous learning and innovation.

Why Join Deel?

Deel is the fastest-growing Software as a Service (SaaS) company in history, transforming how global talent connects with world-class companies. In 2024, Deel paid $11.2 billion to workers in nearly 100 currencies and provided healthcare and benefits in 109 countries. Recognitions include CNBC Disruptor 50, Forbes Cloud 100, Deloitte Fast 500, and repeated inclusion on Y Combinator’s top companies list, alongside a 4.83 average rating from 15,000 reviews.

Joining Deel offers a career accelerator, tackling complex challenges in the global work revolution. With a $17.3 billion valuation and $1 billion in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) in just over five years, you will drive meaningful impact and build expertise as a sought-after leader.

What You'll Do as a Back-End Infrastructure Engineer at Deel

As a Back-End Infrastructure Engineer, you will be an integral part of a truly cross-functional team, contributing to product planning from discovery to deployment. Your input will be valued at all stages of the Software Development Lifecycle. You will collaborate with teams to develop robust new features, APIs, continuously improve industry-leading products, and ensure a white-glove experience for customers.

The Giger Team's Mission

The Giger team at Deel is responsible for building and maintaining a powerful internal platform: a sandbox system. This system empowers engineers to develop, test, and deploy faster than ever by allowing product teams to spin up fully functional, production-like environments in minutes. These sandboxes come complete with real databases, services, queues, and storage, are completely isolated, and empower teams to experiment freely, test infrastructure changes, and validate code safely at scale.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain the control plane powering hundreds of dynamic developer sandboxes.
• Develop backend tooling and services to automate sandbox creation, orchestration, and lifecycle management.
• Productize and provide infrastructure as a platform, including databases, caches, object storage, and queueing systems.
• Scale and tune Kubernetes clusters to provide capacity for volatile workloads, focusing on Karpenter/VPA/KEDA policies, right-sizing, pod density, bin-packing, and scheduling strategies.
• Constantly track and optimize infrastructure costs, understanding that all tiny decisions matter at Deel's Kubernetes scale.
• Own the networking setup, mimicking production environments with enhanced DevEx at scale (traffic routing, ingress tuning, asset serving).
• Implement and evolve observability within sandboxes.
• Partner with the Sandboxes SRE team to ensure uptime and reliability of hundreds of sandboxes daily.
• Work with Deel engineering to improve their DevEx and productize day-to-day needs into a self-service platform.

Who We Are Looking For

• 8+ years of experience in Software Engineering, Infrastructure, or Platform Engineering.
• Strong backend engineering skills: API design, Postgres, Kafka/Nats.
• Proficiency in Node.js, Go, or Python.
• Experience with cloud platforms like AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Advanced experience with Kubernetes, including creating tools, controllers, or operators that extend its capabilities.
• Familiarity with standard Kubernetes tools: networking (ingress controllers, CoreDNS, external-dns, AWS LBC, oauth2-proxy), secret management (Vault, External Secrets), cluster autoscaling and resource tuning (Karpenter, VPA, goldilocks, KEDA), and storage provisioning.
• Experience with Helm charts and GitOps.
• Experience working with and maintaining large Kubernetes clusters (e.g., 1000 nodes, 30k+ pods).
• Excellent system design and problem-solving skills.
• Strong communication and collaboration abilities across multiple teams.
• Hands-on mindset, comfortable working in complex and evolving environments.

Extra Brownie Points

• Experience building internal developer platforms (in-house or with tools like Okteto, Gitpod, Crafting) or Kubernetes operators.
• Production experience with Postgres Operators (e.g., CloudNativePG or Zalando).
• Multi-region and multi-cloud experience.

Total Rewards & Benefits

Deel offers fair and competitive pay with scalable benefits, rewards, and perks reflecting a commitment to inclusivity. These include stock grant opportunities, additional perks based on employment status and country, and the flexibility of remote work with optional WeWork access.

Key skills/competency

• Kubernetes
• Node.js
• Go
• Python
• API Design
• Postgres
• Kafka
• Cloud Platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure)
• System Design
• GitOps