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

About This Opportunity

We are representing a confidential eCommerce technology organization seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to join their growing team in Berlin. This is a hybrid role working directly with development teams to build and evolve a modern private cloud platform.

What makes this position unique: you'll work with actual on-premises infrastructure running Kubernetes and Harvester, not just managed cloud services. Our client operates their own hardware in Frankfurt and is building toward a hybrid cloud architecture that balances on-prem reliability with elastic cloud burst capability. You'll help define SRE practices from the ground up, with a Team Lead SRE hire planned to join soon.

The platform you'll support powers product discovery for over 2,000 European online retailers, handling billions of customer queries annually. Reliability directly impacts client revenue.

Responsibilities

• Define and maintain SLOs, SLIs and error budgets to drive data-informed reliability decisions
• Lead incident response end-to-end: detection, communication, blameless postmortems, and structural fixes that prevent entire classes of future incidents
• Eliminate operational toil through automation and GitOps practices
• Evolve observability across metrics, logs, traces, alerting and runbooks for multiple technology stacks
• Contribute to building custom Kubernetes operators (CRDs) that make stateful search clusters declarative, self-healing and safely upgradable
• Implement and tune auto-scaling (HPA/VPA, KEDA, cluster autoscaler) for infrastructure that currently lacks it
• Plan capacity, performance and cost across on-premises and cloud environments, including peak-season load scenarios
• Join on-call rotation with team support during your onboarding period

What We're Looking For

Must-have qualifications:

• Production Kubernetes experience building clusters on bare metal or your own servers (kubeadm, RKE2, k3s or similar) – you understand cluster lifecycle and upgrades, not just consumption of managed services
• Lived SRE practice: hands-on experience with SLOs, error budgets, incident management and on-call responsibilities
• GitOps or comparable infrastructure/deployment automation experience; Argo CD or Flux experience is a strong advantage
• Solid observability skills across metrics, logs, traces and reliable alerting
• Strong automation instinct – you prefer fixing root causes over repeated manual interventions
• Collaborative, enabling mindset – you view SRE as a service to developers, asking what they need and discussing trade-offs openly
• Fluent English required for team collaboration

Nice-to-have experience (genuinely optional):

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

If your title was never "SRE" but you've owned production systems, handled incidents and worked deeply with Kubernetes, we encourage you to apply. Production experience and engineering mindset matter more than job titles.

How We Work With You

Candidates apply directly through Get A Job.ai. Our recruiting team will conduct an initial screening to understand your background and match it to our client's requirements. Strong candidates are then submitted to the client for their interview process, which includes a technical take-home task (approximately 2 hours), a 90-minute technical interview with developers, a leadership conversation, and a team meet.

Please do not contact the client directly. All communication and coordination goes through our talent team to ensure a smooth, professional process for everyone involved.

Position Details

Location: Berlin, hybrid work model with three office days per week

Tech stack: Kubernetes on own servers, Harvester (KubeVirt), Argo CD/Flux, Prometheus/Grafana, Longhorn/Ceph

Pay: Compensation details will be discussed during the screening process based on your experience level.

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