DevOps Lead

• Technical Leadership: Lead and mentor engineers on infrastructure and operational best practices, supporting a culture of ownership, transparency, and continuous learning.
• Infrastructure & Delivery Ownership: Own our GCP infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), our CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions), and our GitOps delivery model (Flux CD, Helm, Kubernetes), making releases fast, safe, and boring.
• Reliability & Observability: Drive our observability practice across Prometheus, Grafana, and GCP Cloud Monitoring, turning alerts and dashboards into real reliability and reducing toil through automation.
• Manage Complexity: Identify and reduce infrastructure tech debt, lead the evolution of our IaC strategy, and drive our migration to a managed secrets solution and stronger platform security.
• AI-Augmented Engineering Culture: Champion the team’s use of modern AI development tools, helping engineers integrate them into their daily workflow while maintaining high standards for quality and operational integrity., * Hybrid in Berlin: Work hybrid from our Berlin office, combining focused remote days with regular in-person time for workshops, planning, and collaboration.
• Team culture: Join a diverse, multicultural team with an open office culture and a few four-legged colleagues.
• Smart Host Days - Team Travel: Once a year, we take the whole team on a trip abroad. The trip combines team bonding, training, and the chance to live our mission: making vacation smart.

Do you have experience in Terraform?, * Relevant Leadership Experience: You have 7+ years of professional experience in DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering, including 2+ years leading engineers through mentoring, code reviews, knowledge sharing, and team development.

• Cloud Native: You have deep, hands-on experience running production workloads on a major cloud (GCP preferred) with Kubernetes, Helm, and Docker.
• Infrastructure as Code: You are highly proficient with Terraform and treat infrastructure as a first-class, version-controlled codebase.
• CI/CD & GitOps: You have built and operated CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions or similar) and understand GitOps delivery (Flux CD is a strong plus).
• Observability: You have run production monitoring and alerting stacks (Prometheus/Grafana or equivalent) and know what good reliability looks like.
• Distributed Tracing: You have hands-on experience with distributed tracing and APM (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, or similar) and can introduce it to deepen observability across our services.
• Systems Thinker: You understand the fundamentals of networking, distributed computing, and asynchronous messaging, and you automate with Bash and Python before repeating yourself.
• Ownership Mindset: You take responsibility beyond your immediate task and dig deep into the stack to find and fix the source of a problem.
• AI-Forward Mindset: You’re hands-on with AI engineering tools (Claude Code, Copilot, agentic workflows) and have opinions on using them well. You see them as a force multiplier for senior engineers, not a gimmick, and you have a point of view on what they’re good at and where they still fall short.
• Fluency in English: You communicate fluently in English, both verbally and in writing.
• Entitlement to work in Germany: You are legally entitled to work in Germany and do not require visa sponsorship. This is a hybrid role based in our Berlin office, so we can only consider candidates located in or willing to relocate to the Berlin area.

Help Smart Host scale a cloud-native hospitality platform shaping hotel journeys. Own Kubernetes, Terraform & reliability. Curious? Read the full role.