Engineering Manager - Valka.AI

Valka, a visionary spin-off from the Realms Group (the parent company of Oddin.gg), is on a mission to revolutionize the way people create and experience digital content.

Our team believes that content shouldn’t just be consumed; it should be co-created in real time, blurring the lines between imagination and reality. By harnessing the power of cutting-edge AI, we aim to build an interactive human-digital platform where virtual characters respond dynamically to each user’s voice, text, gestures, and more.

This is your chance to join a diverse group of innovators who are driven to redefine what’s possible in generative content. Together, we’re changing the paradigm from passive viewing to active participation, unlocking new creative frontiers across gaming, entertainment, education, and beyond.

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.

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.