Team Lead - Site Reliability Engineering (all genders)

About the Position

Team Lead - Site Reliability Engineering (all genders)

FACT-Finder builds product discovery technology for eCommerce and is trusted by leading online shops across Europe with its two products Next Generation and Infinity. We are actively modernizing our hosting toward Kubernetes on Harvester – as an on-prem hybrid with the option to scale fully into the cloud in the mid-term. As Team Lead Site Reliability Engineering (all genders), you own the reliability, scalability, and cost of our hosting environments, drive this transformation end-to-end, and lead the team that delivers it.

Responsibilities

• Own the operational health of our hosting across on-premise (Frankfurt, Stockholm) and cloud – availability, performance, and incident management.
• Actively drive the modernization toward Kubernetes on Harvester: cluster topology, storage (Longhorn), networking (VLAN, load balancing, ingress), backup, and disaster recovery.
• Build a production-grade k8s platform: lifecycle, upgrades, RBAC, secrets, GitOps (Argo CD / Flux), observability, and policy guardrails.
• Shape the NG Search Operator (custom Kubernetes operator) and solve auto-scaling (HPA, VPA, KEDA, cluster autoscaler) for the current architecture.
• Define our on-prem hybrid model: which workloads run where, how we burst into the cloud, how we keep latency and cost under control – while keeping the architecture portable enough for a future cloud-only move.
• Own capacity planning and hosting cost and turn cost into a deliberate, managed lever.
• Lead and develop our currently 4-person Hosting team, own performance and technical direction, and set the standards and ownership culture.
• Make AI a core part of our operations: diagnosis, automation, monitoring, and insight.

Requirements

• Strong background in infrastructure or platform engineering across on-premise and cloud.
• Hands-on depth with Kubernetes in production: cluster lifecycle, upgrades, networking, storage, RBAC, observability, GitOps delivery.
• Proven people leadership experience, excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Ideally practical experience with Harvester or comparable HCI/virtualization platforms (KubeVirt, vSphere/ESXi, OpenStack).
• Experience leading a real migration from bare metal / classic VMs to a k8s-based platform – including stateful workloads, storage migration, cutover, and rollback.
• Comfort designing or operating Kubernetes operators (custom controllers / CRDs), ideally for stateful systems like search, databases, or streaming.
• Solid grasp of auto-scaling primitives (HPA, VPA, cluster autoscaler, KEDA) and how they interact with capacity planning on-prem and in the cloud.
• Experience with on-prem hybrid architectures and owning reliability, capacity, and cost for production systems.
• Hands-on fluency with AI tools in day-to-day operations.
• Fluent English; German is a plus.

We Offer

• Impact from day one: Your work directly influences the revenue of leading eCommerce brands across Europe.
• Leadership with real scope: You lead an established team and shape our platform in a decisive phase of our transformation.
• Modern tech stack: Kubernetes, Harvester, GitOps, auto-scaling, and an exciting path toward the cloud – with room to build things right.
• AI-first mindset: We use AI as a real part of our daily work, not as a buzzword.
• Ownership & growth: Clear responsibility, short decision paths, and the opportunity to actively shape your role.
• Flexible work: Hybrid work model with a focus on outcomes.
• Strong team: Experienced engineers, an open feedback culture, and an environment where reliability is treated as a real engineering discipline.
• Attractive benefits: Competitive salary, modern equipment, learning budget, and regular team events.

About the Company

We are one of the leading Product Discovery Platforms for European eCommerce. Our search, navigation, and recommendations handle billions of shopper queries every year - driving a combined GMV of more than €160 billion across our customers. These include Intersport, Spar, Douglas and more than 2,000 further B2B and B2C eCommerce companies across Europe.

For over 20 years we have been an essential part of the complex eCommerce landscape, and with our AI-powered Product Discovery Experience (PDX) we are now entering the next phase - as a Private-Equity-owned company (Genui), under a new McKinsey-shaped management team, with a clear growth and EBITDA plan. Offices in Pforzheim, Berlin, Munich, and Stockholm.