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

Introduction

We are representing a confidential European e-commerce technology organization seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to join their growing Berlin team. This is not a typical cloud-console SRE role—our client runs their own hardware and is building a modern private cloud platform on Kubernetes and Harvester, with hybrid cloud capabilities.

This is a unique opportunity to define SRE practice from the ground up alongside development teams, working on infrastructure that powers thousands of online shops across Europe and handles billions of queries annually. When reliability falters, our client's customers lose revenue in real time—your work will have direct, measurable impact.

Responsibilities

• Define and own SLOs, SLIs and error budgets to drive data-informed reliability decisions across the platform
• Lead incident response end-to-end: rapid detection, clear communication during outages, blameless postmortems, and structural improvements that prevent entire classes of incidents
• Eliminate toil through automation and GitOps practices; evolve observability capabilities including metrics, logs, traces, alerting and runbooks
• Help build custom Kubernetes operators (CRDs) that make stateful search clusters declarative, self-healing and safely upgradable
• Roll out auto-scaling capabilities (HPA/VPA, KEDA, cluster autoscaler) and capacity planning across on-premises and cloud infrastructure
• Plan for performance and cost optimization, including handling large-catalogue workloads and seasonal traffic peaks
• Join the on-call rotation and own reliability topics such as SLOs for products, meaningful alerting, and automation projects
• Leverage AI tools where they measurably speed up diagnosis and operations

What We're Looking For

Must-have experience:

• Production Kubernetes experience building and maintaining clusters on your own servers (kubeadm, RKE2, k3s or similar)—not just managed services. You understand cluster lifecycle, upgrades and day-to-day operations
• Lived SRE practice: SLOs, error budgets, incident management and on-call experience
• Hands-on GitOps or comparable infrastructure/deployment automation—experience with Argo CD or Flux is a strong plus
• Solid observability skills across metrics, logs, traces and alerting that teams actually trust
• Strong automation instinct—you prefer fixing root causes over repeating workarounds
• Collaborative, enabling mindset—you view SRE as a service to developers, discuss trade-offs openly, and focus on solving real problems
• Fluent English required

Nice-to-have experience (genuinely optional):

• Harvester, KubeVirt, vSphere/ESXi, OpenStack or similar virtualization/HCI platforms
• Container storage solutions (Longhorn, Ceph) and datacenter networking (load balancing, ingress, VLAN)
• Auto-scaling implementations (HPA, VPA, KEDA, cluster autoscaler) and capacity/cost planning
• Building Kubernetes operators or custom resource definitions
• German language skills
• Certifications (CKA, CKS) are welcome but not a substitute for hands-on production experience

Don't tick every box? If you've owned production systems, handled incidents and worked deeply with Kubernetes—even if your title was never "SRE"—we encourage you to apply. Production experience and engineering mindset matter more than titles or buzzwords.

How We Work With You

Candidates apply through Get A Job.ai, where our talent team will review your profile. Selected candidates will proceed through a structured interview process including an intro call, a take-home task (approximately 2 hours), a 90-minute technical interview with developers, a leadership conversation, and a team meet. Our recruiters will screen and prepare you for each stage before submitting your profile to the client.

Please do not contact the client directly. All applications and communications must go through Get A Job.ai to ensure a fair and organized process.

Role Details

• Location: Berlin, hybrid (three office days per week)
• Tech stack: Kubernetes on own servers, Harvester (KubeVirt), Argo CD/Flux, Prometheus/Grafana, Longhorn/Ceph
• Work model: Hybrid with focus on outcomes and clear ownership
• Team structure: Growing SRE team with a Team Lead SRE hire coming next; collaboration with Berlin development teams

Pay

Compensation details will be discussed during the screening process and are competitive for the Berlin market and seniority level.

Equal Employment Opportunity: Get A Job.ai is committed to creating an inclusive recruitment experience. We welcome applications from all qualified candidates regardless of background, identity or circumstance.