Backend Team Lead, Infrastructure

Upwind is a next-generation Cloud Security Platform that leverages runtime context to identify and prioritize critical risks, providing precise insights and efficient cloud security management. Unlike traditional tools, Upwind uses runtime data proactively for risk prioritization and posture insights, ensuring teams focus on what truly matters. With industry-leading efficiency and eBPF-powered sensors, Upwind delivers comprehensive capabilities, including agentless cloud posture discovery, real-time threat protection, and integrated API security. From misconfigurations to malware defense, Upwind ensures end-to-end, cost-effective cloud infrastructure protection. At Upwind, you’ll have the opportunity to think creatively, explore new ideas, and use your skills to make a meaningful impact on our growth.

We are looking for a highly technical Infrastructure Team Lead to establish and lead a new Infrastructure team.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role focused on the scalability, performance, and reliability of the systems our product and engineering teams run on. You will design and evolve our core infrastructure: databases, messaging systems, and the services around them- to keep pace with a fast-growing, high-load, multi-tenant system, while building and leading the team responsible for it.

This is a leadership role for someone who stays close to the technology: setting technical direction, guiding architecture, getting hands-on with hard performance and scale problems, and working through complex production challenges alongside the team.

What You'll Do

• Take ownership of our infrastructure's scalability, performance, and reliability - end to end, across a fast-growing, high-volume system
• Build and lead a new infrastructure team, hiring and mentoring engineers as the team grows
• Dive deep into architecture, databases (Aurora, OpenSearch, Redis), and system design to identify and resolve scale and performance bottlenecks
• Work hands-on with messaging systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ) and database infrastructure to keep pace with increasing load
• Consolidate infrastructure work under one team and bring structure and clear ownership to this core domain.
• Operate independently - you'll be given real ownership and real problems to solve, and you're expected to drive solutions without needing constant guidance
• Partner with engineering teams across the company, but as the clear owner of infrastructure decisions, not just an advisor

Requirements

• 5+ years of hands-on software development / architecture experience and at least 2 years as a team lead/ tech lead, you've built and designed real systems, not just directed others
• A proven, demonstrable track record of driving significant performance improvements- measurable gains in efficiency, latency, or system load.
• Strong understanding of databases, scalability challenges, and system architecture
• Experience across more than one company/environment
• A degree (any field, any institution)
• Independent, self-driven working style- you take a problem and run with it
• Experience with Java is a big plus

What Success Looks Like

• You build a team that can independently carry infrastructure work
• You can take a messy, high-pressure infrastructure problem and turn it into a solved, owned, well-architected system
• You help strengthen company culture where scale and performance solutions are happening by design and planning, not reactively.
• Leadership can hand you a hard problem and have strong confidence that you will be able to handle it end to end autonomously.