Senior DevOps Engineer

AnstellungsdetailsPermanent Contract, Full
- or Part-Time, Remote or Cologne / Düsseldorf / Darmstadt / BerlinInfoWho we areWe are the tech powerhouse behind Kaufland's international online marketplaces and a company within the Schwarz Group. Driven by a start-up mentality and working on an equal footing within flat hierarchies, we develop the best marketplace solutions for our customers, sellers and partners. #FromEuropeForEuropeDay by day, our Tech & Product Team of about 400 experts pursues the goal of creating the best possible customer shopping experience for our online marketplace. Through innovative technical developments, they not only create an outstanding shopping experience but also lay the foundation for an optimal selling experience for our sellers. Learn more about our division, areas, and cross-functional teams here

AufgabenYour tasks – this is what awaits you in detailYou run and own our self-hosted Apache Kafka backbone and Schema Registry end-to-end, managing ACLs, client quotas, certificates, upgrades, and disaster recoveryYou operate our Debezium-based change data capture pipelines, overseeing connectors, snapshots, offsets, replica lag, and BigQuery sink loaders You run our workloads on Kubernetes, including Navarch
- our self-built workflow orchestrator executing ~7,500 SQL and Python tasks daily
- owning resource management, autoscaling, and debuggingYou automate and own access management and infrastructure as code across our self-hosted GitLab CI/CD pipelines, replacing manual tickets with code-driven policiesYou own observability and infra costs
- Datadog across Kafka and sink loaders, Slack-native alerting, and maintaining an honest view of K8s, Kafka retention, and log volume expensesYou carry your share of triage, one week in three
- handling ingestion and access requests, schema alerts, and supporting analysts, while helping automate this layer via AI-assisted reviewYou act as a senior sparring partner alongside two senior data engineers (reporting to the Head of Data & Analytics)
- driving design reviews and multi-quarter initiatives, with room to grow into BigQuery architecture over time: access frameworks, partitioning and slot strategy, the pipelines and models on topOptional: You take part in our 24/7 on-call rotationProfilYour profile – this is what we expect from youYou have several years of experience operating production infrastructure you were personally responsible for, including on-call rotation. You have run systems that broke, can explain what went wrong and how you permanently fixed it, and can detail a specific trade-off you navigated backed by concrete numbersYou have deep hands-on expertise in Apache Kafka broker operations, including cluster sizing, partition rebalancing, replication, ISR behavior, and version upgradesYou have operated cross-system data replication in production
- ideally Debezium on Kafka Connect, or database replication via binlog, GTID, WAL, or agent-based pipelinesYou demonstrate strong production experience with Kubernetes, master resource management and autoscaling, and possess sharp debugging reflexes for complex failure modesYou manage infrastructure and access as code across multiple environments (ideally Terraform and Ansible; Pulumi, Helm or serious configuration management also counts) following a strict least-privilege IAM approach across multiple environments, ideally with GCP experience or transferable AWS/Azure knowledgeYou use production-grade Python and SQL as practical tools, applying a cost-conscious mindset to query performance, scanning volume, and data pruningYou thrive in a low-process, Kanban-driven environment where seniors self-organize, rotate weekly triage duties without micro-management, and prefer automating recurring requests over manually repeating themOptional: You bring skills or interest in object-oriented design, data modeling/dbt, BigQuery architecture, orchestration frameworks (Airflow, Dagster), stream processing (Beam, Flink, Spark), or internal automation (n8n, AI triage bots).
You are fluent in English (C1 level) and enjoy working in an international team environmentBenefitsWhat

we offer
Create your own work-life balance: You have the flexibility to choose between working remotely (within Germany) or from one of our locations in Cologne, Darmstadt, Düsseldorf, or in Berlin

Do you want to move to Germany? No problem –

we offer
you an attractive relocation package to give you a smooth start. Urban Sports Club and RSG Group Fitness Studios: Get top deals for fitness, swimming, yoga and moreMental Well-Being: We support you on your well-being journey with special offerings such as Instahelp, the digital platform for online psychological counselingVacation & Sabbatical: Enjoy 30 days of vacation per year and the opportunity to take a sabbatical once you have been part of the team for a certain period

Option for Pluxee restaurant vouchers: Buy Pluxee vouchers through us and benefit from