Public summary
Seeking a Senior DevOps Engineer to help manage and operate a self-hosted Apache Kafka backbone and associated infrastructure for a major European e-commerce platform. The role offers flexibility for full or part-time, remote within Germany or on-site in multiple cities, focusing on Kafka operations, Kubernetes workloads, access management, automation, and infrastructure cost monitoring. Experience with production-grade infrastructure, coding in Python and SQL, and working in international, low-process environments is desired. Fluent English is required.
Location and work setup
- Location
- Cologne
- Remote status
- Remote
- German requirement signal
- No German Required Detected
- Detected job language
- English
Responsibilities
Operate and own the self-hosted Apache Kafka backbone and Schema Registry end-to-end, including management of ACLs, client quotas, certificates, upgrades, and disaster recovery. Manage Debezium-based change data capture pipelines including connectors and data sinks. Run workloads on Kubernetes and handle resource management, autoscaling, and debugging. Automate access management and infrastructure as code using GitLab CI/CD pipelines. Maintain observability and infrastructure cost metrics through Datadog and Slack alerts. Participate in triage rotations to handle ingestion, schema alerts and support BI analysts, while working on automation improvements. Collaborate with senior data engineers on design reviews and multi-quarter initiatives, with potential growth into BigQuery architecture. Optional participation in 24/7 on-call rotation.
Qualifications
Several years of hands-on experience running and managing production infrastructure including on-call duties, with proven problem-solving and trade-off decision skills. Deep expertise in Apache Kafka broker operations and system replication technologies such as Debezium. Strong experience with Kubernetes resource management and debugging complex failures. Proficiency in infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform and Ansible, following strict IAM security models. Skilled in production-grade Python and SQL with a cost-conscious approach to query performance. Comfortable working in a low-process, Kanban-driven, self-organized environment. Fluent English (minimum C1 level). Additional skills or interests in OOP, data modeling, orchestration frameworks, stream processing, or automation are a plus.