SRE Lead: Kubernetes, Hybrid Cloud, AI-Driven Ops

FACT-Finder; Germany (OH); Hybrid; USD 103,603 - 172,672; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Learning budget

Hybrid work model

Job summary

FACT-Finder seeks a Team Lead Site Reliability Engineering to own reliability and cost of hosting across on-prem and cloud. You will drive the transformation toward Kubernetes on Harvester, shaping the NG Search Operator and implementing scalable, AI-assisted operations.

You will lead a 4-person Hosting team, define topology, upgrades, and policy guardrails while ensuring latency and availability, with a focus on cost efficiency and cloud-ready portability.

Qualifications

• 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.

Responsibilities

• You own the operational health of our hosting across on-premise and cloud – availability, performance, and incident management.
• You actively drive the modernization toward Kubernetes on Harvester: cluster topology, storage, networking, backup, and disaster recovery.
• You build a production-grade k8s platform: lifecycle, upgrades, RBAC, secrets, GitOps, observability, and policy guardrails.
• You shape the NG Search Operator and solve auto-scaling for the current architecture.
• You concretely define our on-prem hybrid model: workloads, cloud bursting, latency, and cost control.
• You own capacity planning and hosting cost and turn cost into a deliberate, managed lever.
• You lead and develop our 4-person Hosting team, own performance and technical direction, and set ownership culture.
• You make AI a core part of our operations: diagnosis, automation, monitoring, and insight.

Skills

Kubernetes production

Team leadership

Cloud & on-prem

GitOps

Performance tuning

Networking

RBAC

Storage management

Automation

Tools

Kubernetes

Harvester

OpenStack

vSphere/ESXi

KubeVirt

Job description

FACT-Finder seeks a Team Lead Site Reliability Engineering to own reliability and cost of hosting across on-prem and cloud. You will drive the transformation toward Kubernetes on Harvester, shaping the NG Search Operator and implementing scalable, AI-assisted operations.

You will lead a 4-person Hosting team, define topology, upgrades, and policy guardrails while ensuring latency and availability, with a focus on cost efficiency and cloud-ready portability.