Senior Site Reliability Engineer / SRE - Kubernetes & Hybrid Cloud

• 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, * 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.

• 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 GitOpsor 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.

We are one of the leading Product Discovery Platforms for European eCommerce. Our search, navigation and recommendations handle billions of shopper queries every year - driving a combined GMV of more than €160 billion across our customers. These include Intersport, Spar, Douglas and more than 2,000 further B2B and B2C eCommerce companies across Europe.