[Hiring] Senior DevOps Engineer @Kaufland e-commerce

Role Description

Your tasks – this is what awaits you in detail:

• You run and own our self-hosted Apache Kafka backbone and Schema Registry end-to-end, managing ACLs, client quotas, certificates, upgrades, and disaster recovery.
• You 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 debugging.
• You automate and own access management and infrastructure as code across our self-hosted GitLab CI/CD pipelines, replacing manual tickets with code-driven policies.
• You 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.
• You 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.
• You 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: You take part in our 24/7 on-call rotation.

Qualifications

• You 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 numbers.
• You have deep hands-on expertise in Apache Kafka broker operations, including cluster sizing, partition rebalancing, replication, ISR behavior, and version upgrades.
• You have operated cross-system data replication in production - ideally Debezium on Kafka Connect, or database replication via binlog, GTID, WAL, or agent-based pipelines.
• You demonstrate strong production experience with Kubernetes, master resource management and autoscaling, and possess sharp debugging reflexes for complex failure modes.
• You 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.
• You use production-grade Python and SQL as practical tools, applying a cost-conscious mindset to query performance, scanning volume, and data pruning.
• You 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: 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 environment.

Benefits

• 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 more.
• Mental Well-Being: We support you 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 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 tax-advantaged meal allowances!
• ‘Deutschlandticket’: We subsidize your train season ticket for more mobility.
• Employee Discount: You will receive a monthly coupon for Kaufland.de.
• Free choice of operating system: MacOS or Ubuntu Linux, 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.