Bookbot is a recommerce platform that operates in 9 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 the 16th fastest growing tech startup in the CEE region.

Who we’re looking for:

  • You are an 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.
  • You are also familiar with our application stack:
  • Backend: Typescript (AdonisJS on older things, NestJS on the new ones), MySQL, Redis, Manticore, Kafka)
  • Frontend: Next.js, SWR, MaterialUI, BaseUI
  • You have good knowledge of the Czech and English languages.

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). Or you want to take a step in your career towards leadership.

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

  • Have a clear overview of what’s happening in the teams 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 Managers.
  • 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 our CTO, David Gazdoš. There are 18 developers overall.
  • We have daily stand-ups, weekly Backend Tech Meetings and Frontend Tech Meetings, and bi-weekly deep dives into new features.
  • Our office is at Kolbenova metro station, and we work onsite with flexible working hours.

What we offer:

  • Our budget is 140,000 - 200,000 CZK/month
  • Work with awesome people like the internal systems guru Simon, and CTO David. The team is full of good vibes, and we sometimes grab a beer or go rock climbing together.
  • Listen to a podcast with David & 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.

Knihobot s.r.o.