Senior Site Reliability Engineer / SRE – Kubernetes & Hybrid Cloud (m/f/d)

<h2>Introduction</h2> <h2>At a glance</h2> <ul> <li>Location &#x26;workmodel:Berlin, hybrid</li> <li>Tech stack:Kubernetes on our own servers, Harvester (KubeVirt), Argo CD/Flux, Prometheus/Grafana, Longhorn/Ceph</li> <li>Team:A growing SRE team – you report to our CTPO for now and to the Team Lead SREwe'rehiring next; two system administrators in Pforzheim run the physical hardware</li> <li>Process:Intro call · take-home task (~2h) · 90-min tech interview with our developers · leadership conversation · meet the team</li> <li>Languages:Fluent Englishrequired; German is a plus, nota must</li> </ul> <p><strong>Why this role is special</strong></p> <p>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.</p> <p>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.</p> <p><strong>Your first 90 days</strong></p> <p>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.</p> <h2>Your mission</h2> <ul> <li>Define and own SLOs, SLIs and error budgets; drive data-informed reliability decisions</li> <li>Lead incident response end-to-end: fast detection, clear communication, blameless postmortems – and reduce whole classes of incidents structurally, not case by case</li> <li>Eliminatetoil through automation andGitOps; evolve our observability (metrics, logs, traces, alerting, runbooks) across two different stacks</li> <li>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, clusterautoscaler) today's architecture makes hard</li> <li>Plan capacity,performanceand 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</li> </ul> <h2>Your profile</h2> <h2>Must-haves:</h2> <ul> <li>Kubernetes in production – built, not just used:you'veset up andmaintainedclusters on your own servers (e.g.kubeadm, RKE2, k3s) and know cluster lifecycle and upgrades – managed-only experienceisn'tenough for this role</li> <li>Lived SRE practice: SLOs, error budgets, incident management,on-call</li> <li>Hands-on experience withGitOpsor comparable infrastructure/deployment automation– experience with Argo CD or Flux is a strong plus</li> <li>Solid observability skills– metrics, logs, traces, alerting that people trust</li> <li>A strong automation instinct–you'drather fix a problem's cause than repeat its workaround</li> <li>A collaborative, enabling mindset– you see SRE as a service to our developers: you ask what they need, discuss trade-offs openly, anddon'tfall in love with your own solution</li> </ul> <h2>Nice-to-haves (genuinely optional – we'll teach you the rest):</h2> <ul> <li>Harvester,KubeVirt, vSphere/ESXi, OpenStack or similar virtualization/HCI platforms</li> <li>Container storage (Longhorn, Ceph) and datacenter networking (load balancing, ingress, VLAN)</li> <li>Auto-scaling (HPA, VPA, KEDA, clusterautoscaler) and capacity/cost planning</li> <li>Experience building Kubernetes operators/CRDs</li> <li>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.</li> </ul> <p><strong>You don't tick every box – or your title was never “SRE”?</strong> 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.</p> <h2>THE JOY OF WORKING WITH US</h2> <ul> <li>Impact from day one: Your work directly influences the revenue of leading eCommerce brands across Europe.</li> <li>Modern tech stack: Kubernetes, Harvester, GitOps, auto-scaling, and an exciting path toward the cloud – with room to build things right.</li> <li>AI-first mindset: We use AI as a real part of our daily work, not as a buzzword.</li> <li>Ownership &#x26; growth: Clear responsibility, short decision paths, and the opportunity to actively shape your role.</li> <li>Flexible work: Hybrid work model three office days per week with a focus on outcomes.</li> <li>Strong team: Experienced engineers, an open feedback culture, and an environment where reliability is treated as a real engineering discipline.</li> </ul> <h2>Job Location</h2> <p>Berlin, Munich, Pforzheim or Stockholm (all Hybrid)</p> <p>Find <a href="https://www.arbeitnow.com">Jobs in Germany</a> on Arbeitnow</a>