Director of Infrastructure

Our client, a Silicon Valley-based industry leader in retail AI solutions, is now looking for an experienced Director of Infrastructure to join its expanding team.  Location: Poland \ Europe  Type: Remote, Full-time Start date: ASAP About Company: The company is the industry leader in retail AI solutions — a Silicon Valley-based startup headquartered in San Francisco, with operations in Canada, the UK, multiple EU countries, and a tech hub in Poland. A Deep Learning-first organization, their mission is to automate and optimize brick-and-mortar retail through deep learning computer vision. Their technology has been deployed at scale with some of the world's top retailers, processing hundreds of millions of images per day across tens of thousands of stores globally. Recently named Confluent's inaugural Data Streaming Startup of the Year, they've earned recognition for taking on the most demanding engineering challenges at the core of their business. They are looking for smart, creative, and passionate people who want to help build a great and enduring company.  About Role:  They are looking for a hands-on Director of Infrastructure to own and evolve the systems that power the company at scale. This is not a purely managerial role — the ideal candidate is someone who can architect, build, and operate production infrastructure themselves, and who leads by technical credibility as much as by title. The core challenge is scale. The company processes millions of images per day across thousands of retail locations globally, and that number is growing fast. Their infrastructure needs to be reliable, cost-efficient, and capable of handling an order-of-magnitude increase in load without a proportional increase in cost or complexity. The right person for this role will be the one who makes that happen. Responsibilities: Own the design, operation, and continuous improvement of company's core infrastructure - cloud, data pipelines, deployments, and observability. Drive meaningful reductions in COGS and latency without sacrificing reliability or developer velocity. Architect and maintain scalable, data-heavy backend infrastructure built on Python, FastAPI, Kafka, Docker, and cloud platforms. Build and operate deployment pipelines - blue/green and canary deployments, CI/CD tooling, and release processes that support zero-downtime launches at scale. Design and implement monitoring and alerting systems that provide genuine visibility into system health across geographies and environments. Create tooling that gives engineers and stakeholders transparent, easy access to data stored across varying geographic locations and formats. Collaborate closely with backend, deep learning, and embedded engineering teams to ensure infrastructure evolves with product and model requirements. Establish and enforce infrastructure best practices across the engineering organization. Hire and develop a high-impact infrastructure team as the company scales. Requirements:  Bachelor's degree or higher in Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or equivalent. 8+ years of experience in infrastructure, platform, or distributed systems engineering. 3+ years in a technical leadership role, with experience managing or mentoring engineers. Deep hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) at production scale. Strong experience with Python and comfort working across the backend stack. Extensive experience with Kafka or comparable data streaming platforms. Solid experience with Docker, Kubernetes, and container orchestration in production. Strong understanding of CI/CD practices and deployment strategies (blue/green, canary, feature flags). Experience building observability systems - metrics, logging, distributed tracing Proven track record of driving down infrastructure costs while maintaining or improving system reliability. Experience with data-intensive applications and microservices at scale. Startup mentality - you take ownership and prioritize. Flexibility to coordinate across time zones with our global team. Fluent in English (Upper-Intermediate or above). Polish is a plus, but not required Why Join: Strong Values and Mission - Is a tightly-knit team with an ambitious mission and a strong set of core values, which define our approach to business and have successfully guided us since inception. Exceptional Team - They are a team of hard-working, fun-loving professionals from some of the most eminent universities, research labs, and tech companies of our time. We pride ourselves on recruiting exceptional individuals to help us redefine the state-of-the-art. Outstanding Partners - The company works with the largest retailers in the world and has a world-class roster of investors, advisors, and partners to support & advise us in our endeavors. The company offers:  Competitive Salary & Attractive Stock Paid Time Off Team Retreats Education grants