Tech Lead / Platform Lead — Proxy Infrastructure (DevOps)

Overview

SOAX's proxy platform — a geo-distributed, high-load system written in Go, handling HTTP/HTTPS/SOCKS5/TCP/UDP traffic across millions of bare-metal nodes worldwide — has outgrown ad-hoc ownership. We need someone who can turn "it works, mostly" into a properly engineered platform: architecture, standards, and a small team executing against a real roadmap.

Fair warning: we have our share of tangled infrastructure — the same problem solved three different ways in three different places over time, all of it needing maintenance until it's untangled properly. Part of this role is deciding what gets rebuilt, what gets left alone for now, and in what order.

This is a technical leadership role with real hands-on expectations — you're not managing from a diagram, you're in the code and the incidents alongside the team. It's startup-style: no fully paved road, no polished backlog handed to you — you'll often be the one deciding what needs to happen next and making the case for it.

This role is for someone who values personal freedom and flexibility (fully remote, four-day work week) but also wants real intensity: hard problems, real ownership, and a pace where your decisions actually move the needle.

What you'll actually do

• Stay hands-on, starting on day one. The expectation is that you take on the same problems we've been dealing with, alongside us. You'll be in on every incident at first — not a scheduled subset — because that's how you learn where the real issues live, not from a wiki page. In parallel, as soon as you have a rough read on what's going on, you grab a piece of it, pull together the context, find the fix, and ship it. You don't wait until you've "fully understood the system" to start being useful. Once you've built that picture, you move to a shared on-call rotation with the DevOps/SRE engineer, and from there you're finding the systemic fix together, not just surviving the next fire.
• Own the technical roadmap. Architecture decisions, tooling choices, what gets rebuilt vs. patched — you identify what needs fixing at a structural level, propose it, get alignment, and drive it end-to-end.
• Drive the 10x-scale architecture work already in motion — find and fix the next bottleneck before it bites.
• Own the infrastructure as the product it is. Our product is the infrastructure, so owning it isn't a support function — it's the core of what we sell.

What we need from you (non-negotiable)

• Hands-on incident involvement, not delegated. A Lead who explains, coordinates, and reviews but doesn't personally dig in during live incidents isn't what this role needs. We expect you to do the analysis yourself, find the actual root cause, and drive it to a systemic fix.
• Networking depth you can defend live — the ability to reason about routing, NAT, and TLS at the protocol level under questioning.
• Bare-metal experience at scale, ideally geo-distributed — this is not a cloud-only role.
• Genuine curiosity about the technology, not just a career move.
• Demonstrated systems thinking — a real example of diagnosing a systemic failure mode and re-architecting to prevent a whole class of problems.
• A strong output-to-conversation ratio. We'll ask you to walk through concrete deliverables from your last role, with dates and outcomes, not narratives.
• 6+ years in DevOps / SRE / Infrastructure, with at least 2 in a tech lead or de-facto tech lead capacity.

Strong plus

• Exposure to compliance-driven environments (ISO 27001 or similar) — we're targeting readiness by the end of 2026.

What we're not looking for

• Someone whose technical depth doesn't hold up past the first follow-up question — confident big-picture talk that falls apart the moment we ask "why" or "how, exactly."
• Someone who is compelling to talk to but doesn't bring real impact or value.
• Someone whose enthusiasm and confidence isn't backed by a trail of shipped work you can point to.

Culture

We're an empathetic team that leans on mutual support, not blame. Our core value: it's not the mistake that characterizes the system, but the reaction to the mistake.

We share one real goal: to build a genuinely great product.

That comes with real freedom and flexibility — remote, four-day week — but also real expectations. This isn't a trade of "less oversight for less output." It's freedom because we trust you to deliver, and the expectation is that you will. If it's not working, we won't drag it out — we'll part ways quickly and honestly. That's part of why our retention is high: people either move on early, or they stay for years.

What we offer

• Fully remote, four-day work week.
• Compensation paid in GBP.
• Reporting directly to the CTO.
• Paid time off and sick leave.