Senior Platform Engineer

As a Senior Platform Engineer, you will play a key role in executing the technical vision set by the Head of Infrastructure, with a strong focus on operating, stabilizing, and incrementally modernizing our on‑premises infrastructure. The role balances hands‑on ownership of existing platforms and legacy systems with the design and implementation of new, more automated and scalable capabilities.

Working closely with Software Engineering, you will help build and evolve internal platforms and shared services that improve reliability, security, and developer experience across both legacy and modern environments. Rather than a green‑field cloud transformation, this role requires thoughtful integration – bridging current systems with newer platform approaches such as infrastructure‑as‑code, automation, and container‑based workloads where appropriate.

Your work will focus on reducing operational friction, standardizing workflows, and introducing self‑service capabilities in a way that respects regulatory, security, and on‑prem constraints. By treating infrastructure and platforms as long‑lived products, and by aligning closely with the Head of Infrastructure’s direction, you will help ensure a stable, secure foundation today while progressively enabling the next generation of our technical platform.

• Introduce and operate Kubernetes‑based workloads where appropriate, integrating them with existing on‑prem infrastructure and operational process
• Incrementally modernize the platform by gradually migrating suitable services and workflows toward containerized and declarative approaches, without disrupting existing production systems
• Design and evolve hybrid operational models, where legacy VM‑based services and Kubernetes workloads coexist and are supported consistently
• Operate, maintain, and incrementally modernize on‑premises infrastructure and platforms, ensuring availability, security, and performance
• Own day‑to‑day operations, including troubleshooting, patching, upgrades, and capacity management across Tomcat/Apache applications, Postgre
  
  SQL, and supporting services
• Manage and evolve configuration management with Puppet and Ansible, ensuring consistent, secure, and auditable system changes
• Operate and support Ceph storage, including capacity monitoring, performance analysis, and remediation of failures
• Design, build, and operate internal platforms and shared services for application deployment and runtime operations, spanning VM‑based and newer platform components
• Support and execute application releases, working with both manual and automated processes and continuously improving reliability and repeatability
• Build and maintain automation and tooling, primarily in Python, to reduce manual effort and improve operational consistency
• Implement and operate monitoring, alerting, and incident response, using Zabbix and related observability tools
• Participate in an on‑call rotation (weekends included), handling incidents, performing root‑cause analysis, and driving corrective actions
• Identify and address operational risks and improvement opportunities across application runtime, databases, storage, and CI/CD tooling
• Ensure security, compliance, and audit requirements (ISO 27001, SOC 2, GDPR, etc.) are embedded into daily operations and system configuration
• Maintain operational documentation, runbooks, and release procedures to support consistent execution and on‑call readiness
• Evaluate tools and automation with a pragmatic, on‑prem‑first approach, recommending changes that improve stability, security, and maintainability

• Fluent in English (written and spoken), German language skills are a plus
• Practical experience with Kubernetes, including introducing and operating it incrementally in on‑prem environments alongside existing platforms
• Experience using Terraform for infrastructure‑as‑code to manage shared services and infrastructure components in a controlled, versioned manner
• Hands‑on experience operating on‑prem Linux infrastructure in production, with ownership of availability, performance, and reliability
• Strong experience with configuration management using Puppet and Ansible
• Production…