Platform Lead

Bookbot is a recommerce platform that operates in 7 countries, ships books to 40 countries and has already sold over 10 million books. Every day we sell around 25 000 books and receive a little bit more. We are among the 10 of the fastest growing tech startups in the CEE region.

Who we’re looking for:

• You are 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.
• You’re not afraid to propose new solutions and can independently choose the most efficient technological strategies for your team.

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).

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

• Have a clear overview of what’s happening in the team 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 Manager.
• 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 CTO David Gazdoš. 
• There are 20 developers overall.
• We have daily stand-ups, weekly Backend Tech Meetings and Frontend Tech Meetings, and bi-weekly deep dives into new features.
• We work out of offices near Kolbenova metro station, and the occasional home office is possible.

What we offer:

• Work with awesome people like the internal systems guru Simon, and CTO David.
• Listen to a podcast with David (CTO) & Simon to get an even better understanding of how our development team works and what we’re currently tackling.
• We build everything in-house, so there’s a wide variety of problems to solve—you won’t get bored, and there’s always something to work on and innovate.
• You’ll 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, you'll 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 company’s success.
• An informal environment and a pragmatic approach to getting things done.