Site Reliability Engineer (Kafka/Kubernetes)

Location: Düsseldorf, Germany; hybrid work with up to 2 work-from-home days weekly

Company

hirify.global operates a hotel metasearch engine that enables travelers to compare prices from hundreds of booking sites.

What you will do

• Operate 8 production Kafka clusters processing more than 900K messages per second, along with managed Flink, Cassandra, and Redis services.
• Run infrastructure across Google Cloud Platform, including GKE and Compute Engine, and an on-premises datacenter using Rancher.
• Participate in the on-call rotation and support incident recovery across data services.
• Build monitoring and observability for applications and infrastructure.
• Document operational procedures, create runbooks, and automate repetitive work with AI-assisted tooling where useful.
• Debug issues across multiple services and contribute to engineering issues and OKRs.

Requirements

• Hands-on experience operating Kubernetes in production.
• Practical experience with Kafka.
• Experience running infrastructure in both cloud and on-premises environments; Google Cloud Platform, GKE, Compute Engine, and Rancher are relevant technologies.
• Strong analytical and troubleshooting skills in distributed, data-intensive systems.
• Ability to prioritize work independently, including during incident pressure.
• Curiosity about AI tools and automation for incident triage, runbook automation, and daily operations.

Nice to have

• Experience with Flink, Cassandra, Redis, or MySQL.
• Interest in contributing to technical documentation and engineering blog content.

Culture & Benefits

• Small autonomous teams with direct access to production and ownership of technical decisions.
• Continuous deployment, short feedback loops, and dedicated experimentation time.
• Technical learning opportunities including meetups, guilds, architecture reviews, certifications, conferences, workshops, online courses, and a campus library.
• Visa support, a relocation package, an interest-free newcomer loan, and free language classes.
• Self-determined vacation with a minimum of 25 days, flexible working hours, and the option to work remotely from Germany or selected countries abroad for up to 20 days per year.
• Daily canteen budget, snacks and drinks, an on-site gym, sports classes, Urban Sports Club membership, ergonomic workspaces, childcare support, and an on-campus kids room.

Hiring process

• Asynchronous video interview.
• Case study followed by a technical interview and case study presentation.
• Profile Dynamics Assessment and final interview with key stakeholders.