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)

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