Team Lead - Site Reliability Engineering (all genders)

Introduction

FACT-Finder builds product discovery technology for e Commerce 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.

• Your mission
• You own the operational health of our hosting across on-premise (Frankfurt, Stockholm) and cloud – availability, performance, and incident management.
• You actively drive the modernization toward Kubernetes on

Harvester: cluster topology, storage (Longhorn), networking (VLAN, load balancing, ingress), backup, and disaster recovery.

• You build a production-grade k8s platform: lifecycle, upgrades, RBAC, secrets, Git Ops (Argo CD / Flux), observability, and policy guardrails.
• You shape the NG Search Operator (custom Kubernetes operator) and solve auto-scaling (HPA, VPA, KEDA, cluster autoscaler) for the current architecture.
• You concretely 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.
• You own capacity planning and hosting cost and turn cost into a deliberate, managed lever.
• You lead and develop our currently 4-person Hosting team, own performance and technical direction, and set the standards and ownership culture.
• You make AI a core part of our operations: diagnosis, automation, monitoring, and insight.

Your profile

• 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, Git Ops delivery.
• Proven people leadership experience, excellent communication and stakeholder management skills.
• Ideally practical experience with Harvester or comparable HCI/virtualization platforms (Kube Virt, v Sphere/ESXi, Open Stack).
• 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.
• THE JOY OF WORKING WITH US
• Impact from day one: Your work directly influences the revenue of leading e Commerce 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, Git Ops, 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.
• Job Location
• Berlin, Munich, Pforzheim or Stockholm (hybrid)

About us

We are one of the leading

Product Discovery Platforms for European e Commerce . 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 e Commerce companies across Europe.

For over 20 years we have been an essential part of the complex e Commerce 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 Mc Kinsey-shaped management team, with a clear growth and EBITDA plan. Offices in Pforzheim, Berlin, Munich and Stockholm.