Senior DevOps Engineer (all genders) | Data Platform
Summary
A hands-on senior DevOps engineer owning Kaufland's self-hosted data platform — operating Kafka, Debezium CDC pipelines, and Kubernetes to power reliable, cost-conscious data pipelines for the international marketplace, with IaC automation via Terraform/Ansible in GitLab CI/CD, Datadog observability, and optional on-call participation.
In this role you own and optimize our self-hosted data stack, including Kafka, Debezium, and Kubernetes, to power reliable data pipelines for our international marketplace. You will partner with the Data & Analytics leadership to drive cross-quarter initiatives and design decisions, shaping scalable, cost-conscious data infrastructure. You’ll work in a flat, startup-minded team and contribute to a secure, automated, and observable platform. This is a hands-on position with broad influence on data architectures and on-call incident response.
Leistungen / Benefits- Remote option within Germany or office locations: Cologne, Darmstadt, Düsseldorf, Berlin
- Relocation package
- Urban Sports Club and gym benefits
- 30 days vacation per year and sabbatical opportunity
- Deutschlandticket subsidy
- Language learning programs and training opportunities
- Operate and own the Kafka backbone, including ACLs, quotas, certificates, upgrades, and disaster recovery
- Manage Debezium-based CDC pipelines, connectors, snapshots, offsets, and sink loaders
- Run workloads on Kubernetes with Navarch, covering resource management, autoscaling, and debugging
- Automate access management and infrastructure as code across GitLab CI/CD pipelines
- Oversee observability and cost management with Datadog, and monitor Kafka retention and log volumes
- Participate in triage on a rotating schedule, supporting ingestion, schema alerts, and analyst requests
- Act as a senior sparring partner to drive design reviews and multi-quarter initiatives
- Potential to grow into BigQuery architecture (access frameworks, partitioning, pipelines)
- Optional: participate in 24/7 on-call rotation
- Several years of production infrastructure experience with on-call rotations
- Deep hands-on Kafka broker operations (sizing, partitioning, replication, ISR, upgrades)
- Experience with cross-system data replication (Debezium on Kafka Connect or similar)
- Strong Kubernetes production experience with resource management and autoscaling
- Infrastructure as code across environments (Terraform and Ansible; Pulumi, Helm appreciated)
- Least-privilege IAM across multiple environments, ideally with GCP (or AWS/Azure knowledge)
- Production-grade Python and SQL with cost-conscious data practices
- Comfort in a low-process, Kanban environment with self-organizing senior engineers
- Fluent in English (C1) and able to work in international teams
- Optional: interest in data modeling/dbt, orchestration (Airflow, Dagster), or stream processing (Beam, Flink, Spark)
- Strong problem-solving and debugging reflexes
- Collaborative, self-organizing attitude
- Willingness to automate recurring tasks and reduce manual work
- Apache Kafka
- Kafka Connect / Debezium
- Kubernetes