Senior DevOps Engineer (all genders) | Data Platform

Responsibilities

We are representing a confidential e-commerce organization seeking a Senior DevOps Engineer to join their Data Platform team. In this role, you will:

• Run and own a self-hosted Apache Kafka backbone and Schema Registry end-to-end, managing ACLs, client quotas, certificates, upgrades, and disaster recovery
• Operate Debezium-based change data capture pipelines, overseeing connectors, snapshots, offsets, replica lag, and BigQuery sink loaders
• Run workloads on Kubernetes, including a self-built workflow orchestrator executing approximately 7,500 SQL and Python tasks daily, owning resource management, autoscaling, and debugging
• Automate and own access management and infrastructure as code across self-hosted GitLab CI/CD pipelines, replacing manual tickets with code-driven policies
• Own observability and infrastructure costs, managing monitoring across Kafka and sink loaders, alerting systems, and maintaining clear visibility of Kubernetes, Kafka retention, and log volume expenses
• Carry your share of triage responsibilities (one week in three), handling ingestion and access requests, schema alerts, and supporting analysts while helping automate this layer
• Act as a senior technical partner alongside two senior data engineers, driving design reviews and multi-quarter initiatives, with opportunities to grow into BigQuery architecture work
• Optionally participate in 24/7 on-call rotation

What We're Looking For

Our client needs someone with:

• Several years of experience operating production infrastructure with personal on-call responsibility, including the ability to explain past system failures, permanent fixes, and specific trade-offs backed by concrete data
• Deep hands-on expertise in Apache Kafka broker operations, including cluster sizing, partition rebalancing, replication, ISR behavior, and version upgrades
• Production experience operating cross-system data replication, ideally Debezium on Kafka Connect, or database replication via binlog, GTID, WAL, or agent-based pipelines
• Strong production Kubernetes experience with solid resource management, autoscaling knowledge, and sharp debugging skills for complex failure modes
• Infrastructure and access management as code across multiple environments (Terraform and Ansible preferred; Pulumi, Helm, or serious configuration management also valued), following strict least-privilege IAM practices with GCP experience or transferable AWS/Azure knowledge
• Production-grade Python and SQL skills used as practical tools, with a cost-conscious mindset toward query performance, scanning volume, and data pruning
• Ability to thrive in a low-process, Kanban-driven environment where seniors self-organize, rotate weekly triage duties, and prefer automation over manual repetition
• Fluency in English (C1 level) and comfort working in an international team environment

Bonus skills: Object-oriented design, data modeling/dbt, BigQuery architecture, orchestration frameworks (Airflow, Dagster), stream processing (Beam, Flink, Spark), or internal automation tools

Location: Remote within Germany or on-site in Cologne, Darmstadt, Düsseldorf, or Berlin

Employment type: Permanent contract, full-time or part-time available

How We Work with You

When you apply through Get A Job.ai, our talent team will review your background and conduct an initial screening. If we see a strong match, we'll submit your profile to our client for consideration. Please do not contact the client directly—all communication flows through our recruiting team to ensure a smooth, professional process.

Pay

Compensation details will be discussed during the screening process and are competitive for the German market at the senior level.

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