Senior DevOps Engineer (all genders) | Data Platform

Remote oder Köln / Darmstadt / Düsseldorf / Berlin

Voll- oder Teilzeit

Festanstellung

About the Position

We 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. #FromEuropeForEurope

Responsibilities

• Apache Kafka Management: Run and own our self-hosted Apache Kafka backbone and Schema Registry end-to-end, managing ACLs, client quotas, certificates, upgrades, and disaster recovery.
• Change Data Capture: Operate our Debezium-based change data capture pipelines, overseeing connectors, snapshots, offsets, replica lag, and BigQuery sink loaders.
• Kubernetes Workloads: 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 debugging.
• Infrastructure as Code: Automate and own access management and infrastructure as code across our self-hosted GitLab CI/CD pipelines, replacing manual tickets with code-driven policies.
• Observability and Costs: 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 expenses.
• Triage Duties: 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 review.
• Senior Sparring Partner: 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 top.
• Optional On-Call Rotation: Take part in our 24/7 on-call rotation.

Requirements

• Several years of experience operating production infrastructure you were personally responsible for, including on-call rotation.
• Deep hands-on expertise in Apache Kafka broker operations, including cluster sizing, partition rebalancing, replication, ISR behavior, and version upgrades.
• Operated cross-system data replication in production - ideally Debezium on Kafka Connect, or database replication via binlog, GTID, WAL, or agent-based pipelines.
• Strong production experience with Kubernetes, master resource management and autoscaling, and sharp debugging reflexes for complex failure modes.
• 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 knowledge.
• Use production-grade Python and SQL as practical tools, applying a cost-conscious mindset to query performance, scanning volume, and data pruning.
• 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 them.
• Optional: 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).
• Fluent in English (C1 level) and enjoy working in an international team environment.

We Offer

• Flexible Work-Life Balance: Choose between working remotely (within Germany) or from one of our locations in Cologne, Darmstadt, Düsseldorf, or Berlin.
• Relocation Package: Attractive relocation package if you want to move to Germany.
• Urban Sports Club and RSG Group Fitness Studios: Get top deals for fitness, swimming, yoga, and more.
• Mental Well-Being: Support on your well-being journey with special offerings such as Instahelp, the digital platform for online psychological counseling.
• Vacation & Sabbatical: Enjoy 30 days of vacation per year and the opportunity to take a sabbatical.
• Pluxee Restaurant Vouchers: Buy Pluxee vouchers through us and benefit from tax-advantaged meal allowances.
• ‘Deutschlandticket’: We subsidize your train season ticket for more mobility.
• Employee Discount: Monthly coupon for Kaufland.de.
• Free Choice of Hardware: Mac or Lenovo, it’s up to you.
• Boost Your Growth: Benefit from our online language learning programs, diverse in-house training, and our automated 360-degree feedback. We cover the costs for relevant conferences, training opportunities, and approved team workshops to strengthen personal interactions.
• Dynamic Culture: Our dynamic culture combines flat hierarchies, a start-up mentality, an international team of over 65 nationalities, and the strength of the Schwarz Group to provide you an agile and secure working environment.
• Team Players: Connect with your team and others through our digital onboarding journey, the buddy program, and regular team and company events, all-hands meetings, powerful mornings, and much more!

Check out our Principles & our blog for even more insights into our company culture!

Apply

Diversity at Kaufland e-commerce

We welcome applications from everyone, regardless of skin color, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, disability, ethnic origin, religion, and ideology. We are signatories to the Charta der Vielfalt (German Diversity Charter) – because we know that extraordinary things can only be achieved with diversity. Read more here! When applying, you can optionally include your pronouns in your resume.

Why are you the perfect fit for this position?

Don't bother with cover letters - we're interested in facts and figures! Feel free to share your Github profile with us in your application.

As we have very international teams, we would highly appreciate it to receive your CV or profile link in English.

We are looking forward to your application!

Your contact person: Jennifer Biehl