Senior Site Reliability Engineer / SRE - Kubernetes & Hybrid Cloud

Introduction At a glance Location & work model : Berlin, hybrid Tech stack: Kubernetes on our own servers, Harvester ( KubeVirt ), Argo CD/Flux, Prometheus/Grafana, Longhorn/Ceph Team: A growing SRE team - you report to our CTPO for now and to the Team Lead SRE we're hiring next; two system administrators in Pforzheim run the physical hardware Process: Intro call · take-home task (~2h) · 90-min tech interview with our developers · leadership conversation · meet the team Languages: Fluent English required; German is a plus, not a must Why this role is special Most SRE jobs today mean clicking around a managed cloud console. This one doesn't. We run our own hardware in Frankfurt and are building a modern private cloud platform on Kubernetes and Harvester - on-prem by default, with elastic burst into the public cloud and the option to go cloud-only later. You won't inherit a finished SRE practice: you'll help define it, side by side with our Berlin development teams - and you won't do it alone, a Team Lead SRE hire is coming next. SRE here is an enabling discipline: you build what our developers need to ship reliably, while two system administrators in Pforzheim run the physical hardware. And the impact is direct - our product discovery technology powers more than 2,000 European online shops (Intersport, SPAR, Douglas and more), handling billions of shopper queries a year. When product discovery is slow or down, our customers lose revenue in real time. Your first 90 days You get to know both products, join the on-call rotation with a buddy, and own your first reliability topic - SLOs for one product, alerting that actually helps at 3 a.m., or automating away a piece of toil. By day 90 you've shipped visible improvements and know where you want to take the platform next. Your mission Define and own SLOs, SLIs and error budgets; drive data-informed reliability decisions Lead incident response end-to-end: fast detection, clear communication, blameless postmortems - and reduce whole classes of incidents structurally, not case by case Eliminate toil through automation and GitOps; evolve our observability (metrics, logs, traces, alerting, runbooks) across two different stacks Help build our custom Kubernetes operator (CRDs) that makes stateful search clusters declarative, self-healing and safely upgradable - and roll out the auto-scaling (HPA/VPA, KEDA, cluster auto scaler) today's architecture makes hard Plan capacity, performance and cost across on-premises and cloud - including the large-catalogue and peak-season loads our merchants care about - and use AI tools wherever they measurably speed up diagnosis and operations Your profile Must-haves: Kubernetes in production - built, not just used : you've set up and maintained clusters on your own servers (e.g. kubeadm , RKE2, k3s) and know cluster lifecycle and upgrades - managed-only experience isn't enough for this role Lived SRE practice : SLOs, error budgets, incident management, on-call Hands-on experience with GitOps or comparable infrastructure/deployment automation - experience with Argo CD or Flux is a strong plus Solid observability skills - metrics, logs, traces, alerting that people trust A strong automation instinct - you'd rather fix a problem's cause than repeat its workaround A collaborative, enabling mindset - you see SRE as a service to our developers: you ask what they need, discuss trade-offs openly, and don't fall in love with your own solution Nice-to-haves (genuinely optional - we'll teach you the rest): Harvester, KubeVirt , vSphere/ ESXi , OpenStack or similar virtualization/HCI platforms Container storage (Longhorn, Ceph) and datacenter networking (load balancing, ingress, VLAN) Auto-scaling (HPA, VPA, KEDA, cluster auto scaler ) and capacity/cost planning Experience building Kubernetes operators/CRDs German language skills Certifications (CKA, CKS) are welcome but no substitute for hands-on experience - in the tech interview we'll ask about what you've actually built and operated. You don't tick every box - or your title was never “SRE”? Apply anyway. If you've owned production systems, handled incidents and worked deeply with Kubernetes, we want to hear from you - production experience and engineering mindset matter more to us than titles or buzzwords. THE JOY OF WORKING WITH US Impact from day one: Your work directly influences the revenue of leading eCommerce brands across Europe. Modern tech stack: Kubernetes, Harvester, GitOps, auto-scaling, and an exciting path toward the cloud - with room to build things right. AI-first mindset: We use AI as a real part of our daily work, not as a buzzword. Ownership & growth: Clear responsibility, short decision paths, and the opportunity to actively shape your role. Flexible work: Hybrid work model three office days per week with a focus on outcomes. Strong team: Experienced engineers, an open feedback culture, and an environment where reliability is treated as a real engineering discipline. Job Location Berlin, Munich, Pforzheim or Stockholm (all Hybrid)