Engineering Manager Operations Infrastructure

Our client, a new Silicon Valley based profitable B2C product startup building innovative mobile solutions for the planet, is now looking for a talented and experienced Engineering Manager to run the operations team.
Location: Ukraine\Poland, Europe
Type: Remote, Full-time
Start date: ASAP
About project and role:

Based in Silicon Valley and backed by top-tier venture capital, we build consumer technology products that help millions of people stay secure, private, and connected online.
Our flagship VPN product serves over 10 million monthly active users across mobile and desktop platforms. With additional products in development, it were scaling globally and investing heavily in product quality, performance, and growth.

The company is hiring an Engineering Manager to lead the Operations team — the team responsible for a large-scale server fleet spanning thousands of servers across dozens of countries and multiple hosting providers, serving millions of users. The role is open in Poland and Ukraine; strong candidates from elsewhere in Eastern Europe will also be considered. Working hours follow CET (±2h), with travel expected once or twice a year for team workshops.

The Engineering Manager will own what the team delivers. That means leading the engineers, building on-call and incident management that works around the clock, keeping fleet reliability, utilization, and cost visible in numbers, and serving as the primary point of contact for R&D and the business on anything that touches infrastructure. The role reports to the Head of Engineering & Operations.

This is a management role with a technical backbone. The Engineering Manager will not be the deepest engineer in the room — the team has that depth — but needs enough technical grounding to make good calls, challenge the team, and step in when it matters.

What you'll do:

• Lead the Operations team: priorities, 1:1s, growth and performance — and own the outcomes
• Build and run on-call and incident management: 24/7 coverage on a paid weekly rotation, severity levels, clear communication, blameless postmortems. You are the escalation point, not a link in the base rotation
• Make alerting mean something: less noise, every page tied to an action, runbooks and automation for the fixes that keep repeating
• Organize how Operations works day to day — team meetings, planning cadence and the processes between them — and run the async standups across R&D and Operations, clearing blockers before they turn into delays
• Shape how Operations works as an engineering team — practices, standards and habits, not just processes
• Plan Operations work together with the Head of Engineering & Operations, product management, R&D and the business
• Coordinate staged infrastructure rollouts with the mobile and backend teams
• Take part in RFCs and reviews of changes that touch infrastructure
• Work with our vendor lead on capacity planning and fleet cost across multiple hosting providers; keep utilization, reliability and cost visible in numbers
• Stay hands-on when it matters: a hard incident, a design review, a change you want to understand before it ships
• Use and evaluate AI tooling as part of the workflow — we use it across operations, code review and research

The stack you will work with:

Linux on bare metal across multiple hosting providers, multi-IP networking; WireGuard, OpenVPN and IKEv2; Ansible, Terraform, CI/CD and provisioning automation; Prometheus, Loki and Grafana, Grafana OnCall, ClickHouse.

Wath you bring:

• 2+ years formally managing an infrastructure or DevOps team — 1:1s, performance and priorities, not technical leadership alone
• 5+ years of hands-on engineering in infrastructure, DevOps or SRE
• Comfortable with Linux, networking and infrastructure-as-code at the level of reviewing a change, not writing one every day
• You have organized on-call before: set up or reshaped a rotation and an incident process, and lived with the results
• Experience running infrastructure at scale on bare metal across multiple data centers and hosting providers. A single public cloud alone is not enough
• Startup or scale-up experience: you have built processes where none existed, kept calm when priorities moved, switched from an incident to a vendor call in the same hour, and thought about cost per server
• You take ownership. You do not need someone above you to make the call; you make it and stand behind it
• Strong Linux and networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, DNS, routing) — enough to challenge the team and debug alongside them when needed
• Fluent in English (Upper-Intermediate or above) — you will run meetings and write for the whole company every day

Highly Valued:

• A track record of measurably improving reliability or cost — fewer incidents, shorter recovery, lower cost per server
• Hands-on experience with VPN or tunnelling protocols (WireGuard, OpenVPN, IPsec/IKEv2) and traffic obfuscation
• Infrastructure security and compliance: hardening, audits, SOC 2-style controls
• Prometheus, Loki and Grafana, Grafana OnCall, ClickHouse
Ansible, Terraform and CI/CD for provisioning at fleet scale

Why This Role:

• Scale that is real: millions of users on thousands of servers across dozens of countries and multiple hosting providers. The problems are not hypothetical
• On-call, incident management and the team's operating rhythm are yours to build
• A short reporting line to the Head of Engineering & Operations; decisions do not wait