Hybrid Engineering Manager

at Oddin.gg

• Job title: Engineering Manager
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Mid level, Senior
• Salary: Not specified
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: AWS, Cloud, Distributed Systems, Docker, GRPC, Kafka, Kotlin, Kubernetes, Python, Terraform
• Location requirements: Hybrid, Prague, Czech

About the role

• Engineering Manager at Valka.ai, revolutionizing digital content with an interactive platform. Lead product engineering for a real-time video platform and mentor senior developers in a high-performance team.

Responsibilities

• Your primary mandate is to balance development velocity with system reliability and team health. Leading our product engineering efforts, you will help build our real-time video platform and, in cooperation with our AI research teams, integrate the state-of-the-art technologies.
• Architectural Stewardship & Reliability: Provide hands-on technical leadership for our high-scale, real-time backend platform, guiding the architecture of core distributed systems components (e.g., event scheduler, process manager, gRPC/event bus, with high availability).
• Team Leadership (Buddy/Mentor): Lead, coach, and support a high-performing, autonomous team of 6-8 senior developers (Backend and AI) by fostering a high-trust culture, psychological safety, and technical ownership.
• Team Development: Actively support the technical and professional development of team members through coaching and regular, timely feedback.
• Process & Flow Facilitation (Moderator): Ensure smooth, lightweight communication and efficient delivery flow across the teams, proactively removing obstacles and translating the "big picture" strategy to both the team and top management.

Requirements

• Engineering Depth: hands-on senior software engineering experience, with a focus on Kotlin/JVM and deep expertise in designing and operating large-scale, low-latency distributed systems.
• Leadership Track Record: successfully leading and coaching engineering teams (ideally cross-functional), demonstrating high emotional intelligence and experience acting as a mentor and moderator.
• Cloud & Infrastructure Acumen: Proven experience deploying and managing high-availability services on AWS (or similar), with familiarity using Infrastructure as Code tools (Terraform, Docker, or Kubernetes) to manage our hybrid cloud/data center environment.
• Comfort in asking questions, challenging technical decisions, and facilitating discussions without needing to be the most technical person in the room.
• Deep expertise in Distributed Systems Design and solving problems related to high-scale, low-latency communication (e.g., gRPC, event bus, Kafka).
• Previous experience with Python-based production-grade applications is a plus.
• Previous experience with VOD or streaming technologies is a plus.

Benefits

• Health insurance
• Professional development opportunities