Lead Engineer – Platform & Infrastructure

Location: Remote (Europe) OR Hybrid from Amsterdam


ABOUT STREAM

Stream powers real-time Chat https://getstream.io/chat/, Video https://getstream.io/video/, Activity Feeds https://getstream.io/activity-feeds/, and AI Moderation https://getstream.io/moderation/ for billions of end-users across thousands of apps — from Strava and Bumble to eBay and Patreon. Our platform processes billions of API requests per month and supports applications with millions of concurrent users, while delivering highly reliable, low-latency services and a great developer experience.

The Role

We're looking for a hands-on Lead Engineer to own Platform and Infrastructure at Stream. You'll work directly with a small, senior team and will be responsible for improving the efficiency, reliability, and cost profile of the systems powering Stream's entire real-time platform.

This is not an architecture-at-a-distance role. You will write code most of the time, lead infrastructure decisions across teams, and shape how we operate at scale. You'll report directly to the CTO.

Why This Role Exists

Our platform works — but we're growing fast and there's meaningful work ahead on cost optimization, cloud efficiency, and platform scalability. The team needs a strong engineering leader who comes from a software engineering background, can own technical decisions independently, and can make infrastructure move faster without introducing big-org process dependencies.

What You'll Work On

Your first 6 months will focus on three areas:

- Cloud cost optimization — identify waste, drive rightsizing, build tooling and guardrails to prevent cost regressions. We want measurable outcomes, not reports.

- Platform reliability and scalability — improve observability, define SLOs where they're missing, and harden the systems all of Stream's products depend on.

- Architecture and infra evolution — evaluate and drive decisions on Kubernetes adoption, database architecture, and cloud provider strategy (including potential migration work).

Beyond that, you'll shape long-term platform direction, define engineering standards, and collaborate with product and SDK engineers to keep the developer platform fast to build on.

Core Technologies

Go · Python · AWS · GCP · Kubernetes · PostgreSQL · CockroachDB · Redis · Terraform · Prometheus / observability stack

Required

- Software engineering background — you built things, not just configured them. Backend or platform coding experience in Go or Python (not scripting-only).

- Strong AWS or GCP depth — production ownership, not just certifications. Experience with cloud cost optimization at scale with measurable outcomes.

- Distributed systems and database architecture — real schema decisions, replication trade-offs, latency budgets. Not just "ran Kubernetes".

- Hands-on leadership — you can lead a project and a PR in the same week. Comfortable in a team of 3–5, not dependent on large-org support structures.

- AI tooling fluency — you use A