Platform Lead

Bookbot is a recommerce platform that operates in 9 countries ships books to 40 countries and has already sold over 10 million books. Every day we sell around 25000 books and receive a little bit more. We are the 16th fastest growing tech startup in the CEE region.

Who were looking for:

• You are an experienced platform engineer with expertise in AWS & Kubernetes.
• You can quickly get up to speed with our infrastructure and help relieve our CTO David by taking over a range of responsibilities.
• Youre not afraid to propose new solutions and can independently choose the most efficient technological strategies for your team.
• You are also familiar with our application stack:

• Backend: Typescript (AdonisJS on older things NestJS on the new ones) MySQL Redis Manticore Kafka)
• Frontend: SWR MaterialUI BaseUI

• You have good knowledge of the Czech and English languages.

What is your great advantage - you have some experience in leading a small DevOps team but you are still very hands-on (about 80% of your time). Or you want to take a step in your career towards leadership.

Your responsibilities (on top of being a platform engineer):

• Have a clear overview of whats happening in the teams and the broader context.
• Ensure the delivery of results that align with requirements and priorities.
• Regularly report to the CTO and sync with the Product Managers.
• Represent the entire team and be the main contact for the Platform team.
• Organize team demos/presentations.
• Assist Product with ticketing and estimations.
• Help manage sprints to ensure everything is well planned and completed on time.
• Moderate daily stand-ups.

Current and upcoming Platform team projects:

• Kafka Optimization & Reliability

• Designing and managing Kafka consumers with auto-distribution across a worker pool
• Implementing circuit breakers and consumer-based topic control
• Leading zero-downtime migration to self-managed Kafka using Strimzi and MirrorMaker

• CDC with Debezium

• Streaming data from MySQL to Snowflake (including audit logs)
• Implementing transactional outbox patterns

• Secrets Management

• Replacing the current secrets pipeline (AWS Secrets Terraform K8s Secret) with a more flexible solution like External Secrets Operator

• File Handling & S3 Uploads

• Refactoring image upload pipeline to use UUIDs instead of auto-increment IDs
• Enabling direct uploads to S3 using presigned URLs

• Scalability & Infrastructure

• Revamping Kubernetes resource limits/requests
• Implementing autoscaling using Karpenter and KEDA
• Leveraging spot instances for cost optimization

• Testing & CI/CD Enhancements

• Integrating Cypress tests into the CI pipeline
• Finalizing per-PR deployment isolation:

• Separate instances of MailDev
• Isolated Manticore index clusters
• Kafka topic cleanup automation

• Implementing simple A/B testing across backend and frontend

• Setting up alerts and dashboards for everything - we need to know about infrastructure issues before they happen or at least before customer support does.
• Defining blueprints so that regular developers can easily set up monitoring for their features.

DevOps Tech Stack:

• Kubernetes AWS.
• Terraform ArgoCD GitHub Actions Prometheus Loki Manticore Search Redis Kafka Keda Aurora MySQL.

How we work:

• The Platform team currently consists of about 3.5 people including our CTO David Gazdoš. There are 18 developers overall.
• We have daily stand-ups weekly Backend Tech Meetings and Frontend Tech Meetings and bi-weekly deep dives into new features.
• Our office is at Kolbenova metro station and we work onsite with flexible working hours.

What we offer:

• Our budget is 140000 - 200000 CZK/month
• Work with awesome people like the internal systems guru Simon and CTO David. The team is full of good vibes and we sometimes grab a beer or go rock climbing together.
• Listen to a podcast with David & Simon to get an even better understanding of how our development team works and what were currently tackling.
• We build everything in-house so theres a wide variety of problems to solve-you wont get bored and theres always something to work on and innovate.
• Youll see the results of your work immediately - when we rework or optimize a process it typically has visible positive effects not just on the website but also in the warehouse shipping customer support or intake. If something goes wrong youll hear about it within minutes!
• An amazing opportunity to have a significant impact on the future of Knihobot and to grow with us exponentially.
• MultiSport card employee discounts on buying and selling books and discounts with partners.
• Professional development budget.
• One extra week of vacation after one year of cooperation two extra weeks after two years.
• Option to gain ESOP (employee stock ownership plan) and have a financial stake in the companys success.
• An informal environment and a pragmatic approach to getting things done.