DevOps Lead (m/w/d)

Smart Host GmbH; Berlin; Hybrid; EUR 90,000 - 140,000; Full time

Job summary

Smart Host GmbH in Berlin is seeking an experienced DevOps Lead to own our cloud-native platform's infrastructure, delivery pipelines, and reliability. You will lead a technically hands-on team, shape IaC strategy with Terraform, and drive GitOps using Flux CD, Helm, and Kubernetes.

You will mentor engineers, advocate ownership, and apply AI engineering tools to improve quality and efficiency while maintaining high security and performance standards. The role is hybrid, based in Berlin.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional DevOps/SRE/platform engineering experience.
• 2+ years of engineering leadership including mentoring and code reviews.
• Strong hands-on experience with GCP, Kubernetes, Helm, and Docker.
• Proven ability to design and operate CI/CD pipelines and GitOps workflows.
• Solid observability practice with Prometheus/Grafana or similar.
• Experience with distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry/Jaeger).
• Strong networking, distributed systems understanding, and scripting in Bash/Python.

Responsibilities

• Own infrastructure, delivery pipelines, and reliability of a cloud-native platform.
• Lead and mentor engineers, promote ownership and learning culture.
• Oversee IaC strategy, Terraform usage, and migrations to secure, scalable secrets management.
• Drive observability and incident reduction through automation and dashboards.
• Implement and champion AI tooling within engineering workflows.

Skills

Leadership experience

Cloud-native

Infrastructure as Code

CI/CD & GitOps

Observability

Distributed tracing

Systems thinking

Automation (Bash/Python)

AI engineering mindset

English fluency

Tools

Terraform

Kubernetes

Helm

Docker

GitHub Actions

Flux CD

Prometheus

Grafana

OpenTelemetry

Jaeger

Python

Bash

Job description

Help Smart Host scale a cloud-native hospitality platform shaping hotel journeys. Own Kubernetes, Terraform & reliability. Curious? Read the full role.

Smart Host is a B2B SaaS platform helping hotels turn fragmented guest and booking data into actionable insights.

For 2026, we’re taking the platform to the next level by building a broader hospitality ecosystem that connects selected technology partners to improve the guest experience across the entire hotel journey.

What you'll do

As our DevOps Lead, you will own the infrastructure, delivery pipelines, and reliability of our cloud-native platform, and lead how we build, deploy, and operate software as we scale. You will report directly to the CTO. This is a technical leadership role with a meaningful hands‑on component: roughly 60% of your time on infrastructure engineering, automation, and technical decision‑making, and 40% on team leadership, mentoring, planning, and cross‑functional collaboration.

Your tasks in a nutshell:

• Technical Leadership: Lead and mentor engineers on infrastructure and operational best practices, supporting a culture of ownership, transparency, and continuous learning.
• Infrastructure & Delivery Ownership: Own our GCP infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), our CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions), and our GitOps delivery model (Flux CD, Helm, Kubernetes), making releases fast, safe, and boring.
• Reliability & Observability: Drive our observability practice across Prometheus, Grafana, and GCP Cloud Monitoring, turning alerts and dashboards into real reliability and reducing toil through automation.
• Manage Complexity: Identify and reduce infrastructure tech debt, lead the evolution of our IaC strategy, and drive our migration to a managed secrets solution and stronger platform security.
• AI-Augmented Engineering Culture: Champion the team's use of modern AI development tools, helping engineers integrate them into their daily workflow while maintaining high standards for quality and operational integrity.

What you bring

• Relevant Leadership Experience: You have 7+ years of professional experience in DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering, including 2+ years leading engineers through mentoring, code reviews, knowledge sharing, and team development.
• Cloud Native: You have deep, hands‑on experience running production workloads on a major cloud (GCP preferred) with Kubernetes, Helm, and Docker.
• Infrastructure as Code: You are highly proficient with Terraform and treat infrastructure as a first‑class, version‑controlled codebase.
• CI/CD & GitOps: You have built and operated CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions or similar) and understand GitOps delivery (Flux CD is a strong plus).
• Observability: You have run production monitoring and alerting stacks (Prometheus/Grafana or equivalent) and know what good reliability looks like.
• Distributed Tracing: You have hands‑on experience with distributed tracing and APM (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, or similar) and can introduce it to deepen observability across our services.
• Systems Thinker: You understand the fundamentals of networking, distributed computing, and asynchronous messaging, and you automate with Bash and Python before repeating yourself.
• Ownership Mindset: You take responsibility beyond your immediate task and dig deep into the stack to find and fix the source of a problem.
• AI-Forward Mindset: You're hands‑on with AI engineering tools (Claude Code, Copilot, agentic workflows) and have opinions on using them well. You see them as a force multiplier for senior engineers, not a gimmick, and you have a point of view on what they're good at and where they still fall short.
• Fluency in English: You communicate fluently in English, both verbally and in writing.
• Entitlement to work in Germany: You are legally entitled to work in Germany and do not require visa sponsorship. This is a hybrid role based in our Berlin office, so we can only consider candidates located in or willing to relocate to the Berlin area.

Why Smart Host

• Real impact: You will have direct influence on technical decisions, architecture, and the growth of our engineering team.
• Hybrid in Berlin: Work hybrid from our Berlin office, combining focused remote days with regular in‑person time for workshops, planning, and collaboration.
• Team culture: Join a diverse, multicultural team with an open office culture and a few four‑legged colleagues.
• Smart Host Days - Team Travel: Once a year, we take the whole team on a trip abroad. The trip combines team bonding, training, and the chance to live our mission: making vacation smart.