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

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Berlin 9/8/2026 Experienced

IntroductionAt a glance <ul><li>Location & work model: 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 SRE we're hiring 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 English required; German is a plus, not a must</li></ul>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<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>Eliminate toil through automation and GitOps; 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, cluster auto scaler) today's architecture makes hard</li><li>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</li></ul> Your profileMust-haves: <ul><li>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</li><li>Lived SRE practice: SLOs, error budgets, incident management, on-call</li><li>Hands-on experience with GitOpsor 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'd rather 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, and don't fall in love with your own solution</li></ul>Nice-to-haves (genuinely optional – we'll teach you the rest): <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, cluster auto scaler) and capacity/cost planning</li><li>Experience building Kubernetes operators/CRDs</li><li>German language skills</li></ul>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<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 & 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> Job Location<span style="color:rgb(66,66,66);font-family:Verdana, Geneva, sans-serif, Inter, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:14px;font-style:normal;font-weight:400;text-transform:none;background-color:rgb(255,255,255);display:inline;">Berlin, Munich, Pforzheim or Stockholm (all Hybrid)Find <a href="https://www.arbeitnow.com">Jobs in Germany</a> on Arbeitnow</a>

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

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