Senior Infrastructure Engineer

Job description

Stream powers real-time Chat, Video, Activity Feeds, and AI Moderation for billions of end-users across thousands of apps, processing billions of API requests per month. This is a full-time job opening based in Amsterdam, Toronto or remote in Europe/EU. Hybrid policy: applicants based in the Netherlands or relocating here are expected to work in the office in Amsterdam 3 times per week. Exemptions may apply to specific cases. Relocation and visa sponsorship is possible. WHAT WILL YOU WORK ON As a Senior Infrastructure Engineer, you join a small, senior platform team during a period of significant change: an AWS to GCP migration, a move to Kubernetes, and the relocation of 35-40 Postgres shards from managed RDS to self-hosted. This is a hands-on role: you will write code most of the time, own infrastructure decisions independently, and work without the support structures of a large organisation. Success looks like systems that scale predictably under load, cloud spend that falls per unit of traffic, and migrations that land without incident. Job Responsibilities - Design, build, and operate infrastructure for high-scale real-time systems handling millions of concurrent connections and billions of monthly API requests. - Drive Kubernetes work end-to-end: cluster architecture, workload design, and migration of existing services, rather than operating clusters someone else designed. - Contribute to the AWS-to-GCP migration, including re-architecting workloads for cost and performance rather than lifting and shifting. - Own cost and efficiency optimisation across cloud infrastructure, identifying levers and measuring outcomes against real spend and utilisation data. - Write production Go and Python: internal services, platform tooling, and automation that improve how product and SDK engineers deploy, observe, and debug. - Lead post-migration tuning and capacity planning, closing the loop between architectural decisions and production behaviour. - Partner with backend, video, and moderation engineers on system design, reliability targets, and tradeoffs that span service boundaries. - Participate in on-call, incident response, and root cause analysis, turning findings into durable fixes rather than one-off patches. ABOUT YOU You have - 5+ years in infrastructure, platform, DevOps, or SRE engineering, with clear depth in infrastructure over application development. - Software engineering background: you have built systems, not only configured them. Production coding experience in Go or Python; scripting-only backgrounds are not a fit. - Kubernetes experience at a meaningful production scale that goes beyond operations: you have driven cluster strategy, designed workloads, or led a migration. - Demonstrated cloud cost or efficiency optimisation at scale, on AWS or GCP - Direct experience running high-scale, high-load production systems. - Strong cloud fundamentals of networking, compute, storage, IAM and the habit of asking why a system behaves as it does rather than accepting defaults. - Hands-on in a small team: comfortable leading a project and reviewing a PR in the same week, without large-org support structures. - Active use of AI tooling in your engineering workflow: applied adoption, not familiarity. Bonus points - Experience across both AWS and GCP; cloud migration experience between providers is a strong plus. - Large-scale PostgreSQL knowledge: sharding, replication strategy, or partitioning tradeoffs, ideally self-hosted. - Background with real-time systems — WebSockets, WebRTC, streaming, or persistent-connection workloads. - Familiarity with the wider stack: CockroachDB, Redis, Terraform, and a Prometheus-based observability stack. - Prior experience at an API-first or infrastructure-enabling scaleup. OUR TECH STACK At Stream, we use a wide collection of technologies to offer highly optimized and available features to our customers. Here is a shortlist of the technologies that we currently use: - Go, gRPC, RocksDB, Python - PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ - GCP, Puppet - Grafana, Graphite, ELK, Jaeger - Redis, Memcached - Claude Code, Cursor WHY JOIN STREAM? - History of success. From Amsterdam to Boulder and Techstars in-between, Stream has raised over $58.25M to build the best Chat Messaging & Activity Feed infrastructure available, with best-in-class support. - Freedom and endless growth opportunities. As a rapidly growing startup (since 2020 we have gone from 30 to 150 employees), Stream gives you unique personal and professional growth opportunities. The opportunity of true ownership and accountability has a massive impact on your career. These are the things you can rarely experience in huge corporations. - Be on the front line of progress and innovation. While working with cutting-edge technology, we are passionate about tackling difficult tech problems at scale and creating reusable components for them, empowering engineering teams to ship apps faster, more securely, and with a better user experience. - They believe in us: Stream is backed by leading VC companies (Felicis Ventures, GGV Capital, 01.Advisors, Techstars, Arthur Ventures), including backers like Dick Costolo (01 Advisors, ex-CEO of Twitter), Olivier Pomel (CEO of Datadog), Tom Preston-Werner (Co-Founder of GitHub), Nicolas Dessaigne (Co-Founder of Algolia), Johnny Boufarhat (Founder and CEO of Hopin). WHAT WE HAVE TO OFFER YOU Stream employees enjoy some of the best job benefits in the industry: - A team of exceptional engineers - The chance to work on OSS projects - 28 days paid time off plus paid Dutch holidays - Company equity - A pension scheme - Hybrid work flexibility (3 days in-office) - A Learning and Development budget - Commute coverage: NS business card or a company bike - Fitness stipend - Bi-weekly in-office chair massages by a professional - MacBook Pro and peripherals provided - Healthy catered team lunches and plenty of snacks - A generous relocation package, visa sponsorship and 30% ruling support - An office in the heart of Amsterdam - The opportunity to attend or present at global conferences and meetups - The possibility to visit our office in Boulder, CO Note: this list of job benefits applies to Netherlands-based employees and is adjusted per your location of residence. OUR CULTURE Stream has a casual social culture, our team is diverse and we all have different backgrounds. Now, Stream is a team of over 130+ peers from over 35 countries across the globe. We value transparency, aim for excellence, and support each other on our way to new victories. Our team consists of the strongest talents worldwide, making Stream a great place to learn and improve your skills. When it comes to software engineering jobs, our culture is oriented towards ownership and quality: our goal is to deliver stable software. If you are interested in becoming a part of what we do, apply for this vacancy now! Hybrid office policy: applicants based (or relocating to) one of our office locations are expected to work according to the applicable local office attendance policy. Equal opportunity employer statement: Stream provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment and prohibits discrimination and harassment of any type without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by federal, state or local laws. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation and training. Note for external recruiters: We currently have this role covered and do not accept unsolicited agency resumes. We are not responsible for any fees related to unsolicited resumes.