Engineering Manager (with DevOps background)

Job description

Help scale the infrastructure behind a real-time iGaming platform serving 150M+ players worldwide while leading our SRE and Platform Engineering teams. ## **About Patrianna** At Patrianna, we build a high-performance B2B platform for the global iGaming industry, enabling partners to launch and scale digital gaming products across multiple international markets. Our platform serves as the foundation for multiple gaming brands, providing the core systems that power gameplay, integrations, and platform capabilities across different markets. We operate in a fast-moving scale-up environment where impact matters more than process for its own sake. Teams are trusted to take ownership of the systems they build and the outcomes they deliver. Our engineering culture is built around a few core principles: - **Pragmatic execution:** We focus on solving meaningful engineering problems and delivering reliable systems without unnecessary bureaucracy; - **Clear ownership and accountability:** Teams operate within defined responsibilities and leadership structures that ensure decisions are made and outcomes are delivered; - **Technical depth matters:** We value engineers and managers who understand their systems deeply and make thoughtful technical decisions; - **Direct communication:** We address problems openly, challenge assumptions, and resolve issues quickly. We believe strong engineering leadership starts with technical credibility and ownership of outcomes. ## **AI-Driven Engineering Culture** We are actively building an AI-driven engineering organization with a clear and deliberate stance: artificial intelligence is a core part of how we build and deliver software — not an experiment, not a trend, and not an optional add-on. AI is embedded into our engineering workflows, from system design and prototyping to refactoring, testing, and code review. We expect engineers to be fully comfortable working in AI-driven environments and to treat AI as a primary productivity multiplier. Strong engineering judgment, architectural ownership, and accountability remain essential—AI amplifies our engineers, it doesn’t replace responsibility for technical decisions. ## **The role** We are looking for a hands-on **Engineering Manager to lead our DevOps function** across two specialized engineering teams: **Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)** and **Platform Engineering**. **The SRE team** is focused on production reliability, availability, observability, incident management, operational excellence, and continuously improving the resilience of our systems. **The Platform Engineering team** works on larger strategic initiatives that evolve our infrastructure and engineering platform — improving scalability, automation, developer experience, deployment capabilities, infrastructure architecture, and operational efficiency. You will be responsible for ensuring both teams have clear roadmaps, well-defined priorities, realistic commitments, and strong execution. You will create the structure and engineering practices necessary for teams to deliver complex infrastructure initiatives predictably while maintaining the reliability of a rapidly growing production platform. This is **not a coordination-only management role**. We expect our DevOps Engineering Manager to have deep technical expertise and remain close to the technology. You should be capable of understanding infrastructure architecture in depth, challenging technical decisions, reviewing proposed solutions, troubleshooting complex production problems, and working hands-on with the platform when necessary. You will combine the technical depth of a senior DevOps/Platform engineer with strong engineering and operational management, delivery, and people leadership skills. ## **What you will be doing** **Management & Delivery:** - **Own the DevOps roadmap and delivery outcomes** – establish clear roadmaps across SRE and Platform Engineering, translate priorities into concrete initiatives and commitments, and ensure teams deliver against realistic timelines; - **Drive predictable execution** – establish effective planning and execution practices, track progress against commitments, identify delivery risks early, manage dependencies, and ensure clear ownership of initiatives; - **Lead SRE and Platform Engineering** – provide leadership across both operational reliability and longer-term platform development, balancing immediate production needs with strategic infrastructure improvements; - **Own people management** – manage and develop DevOps engineers, including performance reviews, career development, compensation and promotion input, hiring, team structure, and handling performance concerns when needed; - **Partner with engineering teams** – work closely with Engineering Managers, Team Leads, and engineers across the organization to understand infrastructure needs, resolve systemic problems, and ensure the platform enables rather than blocks product delivery. **Technical Leadership:** - **Provide hands-on technical leadership** – stay close to infrastructure and production systems, participate in architecture discussions, challenge technical decisions, review proposed solutions, and contribute directly when complex problems require it; - **Drive platform reliability** – continuously improve availability, resilience, observability, incident response, capacity management, and operational readiness across the platform; - **Strengthen incident management** – ensure incidents are handled effectively, root causes are understood, postmortems produce meaningful actions, and recurring operational problems are systematically eliminated; - **Evolve the engineering platform** – drive initiatives around Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, CI/CD, GitOps, Infrastructure as Code, observability, scalability, security, and developer experience; - **Improve engineering effectiveness** – identify bottlenecks, repetitive operational work, and inefficient processes, and drive automation and platform improvements that increase engineering productivity; - **Drive infrastructure efficiency** – continuously evaluate infrastructure architecture, resource utilization, and cloud costs, identifying opportunities to improve performance and reliability while keeping the platform cost-efficient. ## **What we are looking for** **Leadership & Management Requirements:** - **Engineering leadership experience** – proven experience leading infrastructure, DevOps, SRE, or Platform Engineering teams while balancing technical leadership, delivery ownership, and people management; - **Strong delivery ownership** – ability to build realistic roadmaps, break complex technical initiatives into executable work, establish commitments and deadlines, identify risks, and drive initiatives through to completion; - **Strong communication skills** – able to communicate clearly with engineers and leadership, challenge assumptions constructively, explain technical trade-offs, and create alignment around priorities and decisions. **Technical Requirements:** - **Deep hands-on DevOps expertise** – extensive experience building and operating production infrastructure, with the technical depth expected from a Senior/Lead/Staff-level DevOps, SRE, or Platform Engineer; - **Strong Google Cloud Platform experience** – deep production experience with GCP, including GKE, Compute Engine, networking, IAM, DNS, load balancing, and cloud cost optimization; - **Deep Kubernetes expertise** – strong understanding of Kubernetes architecture, networking, ingress, storage, autoscaling, security, cluster lifecycle, and production troubleshooting; - **Infrastructure as Code expertise** – strong production experience with Terraform/Terragrunt, Helm, and infrastructure automation; - **CI/CD and GitOps expertise** – strong experience designing and operating modern delivery platforms using technologies such as Argo CD, GitHub Actions, Jenkins, or Azure DevOps; - **Strong production operations background** – experience operating high-availability production environments, participating in on-call rotations, troubleshooting distributed systems, and leading incident response; - **Observability expertise** – strong understanding of metrics, logs, tracing, alerting, SLOs, and production monitoring using technologies such as Prometheus, Grafana, Loki/ELK, or similar platforms; - **Strong systems thinking** – ability to reason about complex distributed systems, understand dependencies and failure modes, and make pragmatic architectural trade-offs across reliability, scalability, delivery speed, and cost. ## **Nice to Have** - Experience leading both SRE and Platform Engineering teams; - Experience operating high-load, real-time distributed platforms; - Experience defining and operating SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets; - Experience building internal developer platforms or developer self-service capabilities; - Experience with Kafka and large-scale event-driven systems; - Experience with PostgreSQL/AlloyDB and Redis; - Experience driving cloud infrastructure cost optimization / FinOps initiatives; - Experience in iGaming; - Experience working in product companies or fast-growing scale-ups; - Previous experience as a Staff/Principal DevOps Engineer, SRE, Platform Engineer, or Infrastructure Architect. ## **Our Tech Stack** - Google Cloud Platform; - Kubernetes / GKE; - Terraform / Terragrunt; - Helm; - Argo CD; - Jenkins / GitHub Actions / Azure DevOps; - Kafka; - AlloyDB for PostgreSQL; - Redis / Memcached; - Prometheus / Grafana; - Loki / ELK; - Sentry; - Jira / Confluence / Slack / Bitbucket. ## **What Success Looks Like in This Role** **After 3 months:** You understand our infrastructure architecture, production environment, operational challenges, and the responsibilities of the SRE and Platform Engineering teams. Both teams have clear ownership, priorities, and roadmaps. **After 6 months:** SRE and Platform Engineering operate against clear commitments with predictable execution. Reliability and operational problems are systematically tracked and addressed, while strategic platform initiatives move forward according to the roadmap. **After 12 months:** The DevOps function operates as a high-performing engineering organization with strong technical ownership, predictable delivery, mature reliability practices, and a platform roadmap that measurably improves scalability, developer productivity, operational efficiency, and infrastructure reliability. ## **Why You’ll Love It** You’ll have significant ownership over the infrastructure and engineering platform behind systems serving millions of players worldwide. You’ll work on problems where reliability, scalability, automation, developer productivity, and infrastructure architecture have direct business impact. This role allows you to shape both **how our production platform operates today and how our engineering platform evolves for the future**. You’ll lead highly technical engineers while remaining close enough to the technology to influence architecture, solve difficult engineering problems, and see the direct impact of your decisions. We operate with minimal bureaucracy, fast decision-making, and a strong expectation of ownership. **What's on offer:** 1. Full remote flexibility — work from wherever you do your best thinking; 2. Generous paid time off, including vacation, sick leave, and bank holidays; 3. Genuine, unlimited growth opportunities in a fast-scaling business; 4. Engaging company events and a team that actually enjoys working together.