Engineering Manager SRE & DevOps (d/f/m)

Kleinanzeigen is Germany's most-visited classifieds platform — and one of Europe's largest digital marketplaces. Hundreds of engineers depend on a shared platform to build, deploy, and run the products that reach roughly 50% of the German internet population. The SRE & DevOps team is the team that makes that platform real — provisioning the infrastructure, owning the pipelines, defining the standards, and ensuring everything holds together at scale.
We are looking for a senior Engineering Manager to lead this area. You will manage two teams totalling approximately 10 engineers, work in close partnership with a deeply experienced Technical Product Manager who brings strong domain expertise across the full platform engineering scope, and report to the Head of Engineering for Platform Engineering.

This is a high-impact role with real scope. You will be the person who shapes the team's direction and momentum, defines the technical strategy, and ensures the platform delivers genuine leverage to the engineers who depend on it — while keeping your team healthy, motivated, and growing.

CONTEXT: WHERE WE ARE AND WHERE WE ARE GOING

Platform Engineering at Kleinanzeigen is raising the bar on what internal platform means in practice. The SRE & DevOps team sits at the centre of this: owning the infrastructure layer, the delivery pipelines, and the self-service surface that lets product engineers move fast without creating chaos.

The right Engineering Manager will help define what this team becomes — not just manage what it already is. That means coming in with a clear perspective on what good looks like in platform engineering, a commitment to continuous improvement, and the credibility to bring both your team and your stakeholders along.

The platform runs at scale, with real reliability expectations. We are simultaneously improving foundations and shipping new capabilities. This is a role for someone who is energised by complexity, continuous improvement, and the opportunity to shape what comes next.

QUALIFICATIONS

We know that some candidates won't meet every requirement listed here. If this role excites you and you bring most of what we're looking for, we encourage you to apply.

Required

• Proven experience as an Engineering Manager in a DevOps, SRE, or Platform Engineering context — you have led teams that own shared infrastructure and are accountable for reliability.
• Strong working knowledge of AWS — infrastructure provisioning, IAM, networking, cost management — you can hold a substantive technical conversation at every level.
• Solid understanding of Kubernetes and container orchestration at scale.
• Hands-on background with CI/CD systems and delivery pipelines (e.g. GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, or equivalent).
• Track record of growing engineers: through structured feedback, coaching, and well-constructed development conversations.
• Excellent communication skills — you translate between technical depth and business context fluently, and write clearly under pressure.
• Experience managing in environments with real reliability requirements — you understand what it means to own an on-call rota and the culture that sustains it.

Strong Advantage

• Experience building or scaling self-service platform capabilities and developer tooling for engineering teams.
• Familiarity with service mesh, traffic routing, or networking technologies (e.g. Envoy, Istio, AWS networking primitives).
• Experience managing through organisational change or significant scope transitions.
• Familiarity with platform maturity frameworks or developer experience measurement (DORA, SPACE, DX Core 4, or similar).

Profile

• You surface concerns early — including in rooms with more seniority than you.
• You distinguish clearly between technical direction (which you set collaboratively) and technical execution (which belongs to your engineers).
• You are as comfortable in a roadmap conversation as in an incident postmortem.
• You believe a good platform team is invisible to the engineers who depend on it — and you measure success accordingly.
• You invest in the people around you as deliberately as you invest in the technical platform.
• You know when to align before deciding and when to decide and communicate.