Hands-on Engineering Manager (GCP/Kubernetes)

Location: 100% remote in EMEA; Berlin, Germany listed as another location

Salary: €82,000–€140,000 per year, determined partly by candidate location and local labor market rates

Company

hirify.global is a self-funded EdTech company building personalized online learning platforms for students.

What you will do

• Design, build, and operate infrastructure supporting engineering teams, including GCP/Kubernetes clusters, CI/CD pipelines, databases, edge systems, and observability.
• Lead the migration of on-premise workloads to GKE and modernize legacy architecture while strengthening security and business continuity.
• Develop platform self-service capabilities and reduce the operational burden on development teams.
• Work with Engineering Managers and product development leadership to scope and prioritize platform work.
• Manage, mentor, train, and provide recurring feedback and performance reviews for a team of four engineers while spending approximately 50% of the time hands-on.

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent practical experience.
• 2+ years of mentoring or leadership experience, including 1+ year leading a team formally or as a tech lead.
• 7+ years of DevOps, SRE, or Infrastructure Engineering experience, including 3+ years running production Kubernetes workloads, preferably GKE.
• 3+ years with a major cloud provider and Infrastructure as Code; senior-level knowledge of GCP IAM, networking, KMS, GKE, CloudSQL, and Secret Manager is expected.
• 3+ years operating at Senior, Staff, or Principal Engineer level.
• Experience designing and operating CI/CD pipelines and using GitOps with FluxCD or ArgoCD.
• Experience working with engineering teams and managers as customers to scope and prioritize work.
• Experience leading incident response and running postmortems.
• Ability to complete a two-month initial onboarding as a senior engineer, begin manager onboarding during month two, and take over the team at approximately 10 weeks.

Nice to have

• Experience leading a significant architectural migration or working with consumer platforms at scale.
• Experience building in regulated environments.
• Experience operating self-hosted observability stacks such as Prometheus, Thanos, Loki, Grafana, Tempo, or OpenTelemetry.
• Experience building internal developer platforms or self-service tooling.
• Experience supporting .NET/C# deployments.
• Experience with PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, RabbitMQ, Istio, or other service meshes.

Culture & Benefits

• Remote, full-time permanent role serving an EMEA-based workforce.
• Management emphasizes pedagogical principles, direct oversight, meaningful feedback, continuous improvement, and developing engineers.
• Approximately 50% hands-on engineering work remains expected after onboarding.
• hirify.global provides timely feedback throughout the hiring process and reasonable accommodations when needed.
• Individuals only; recruitment agencies are not accepted.

Hiring process

• Application and CV review followed by a 20-minute initial technical screen with administrative questions and seven short technical questions.
• Behavioral interview, technical interview, scenario-based interview covering two DevOps scenarios, and a leadership interview with the Head of Engineering and executive leadership.
• Provide three references, including at least one former or current manager and any former or current direct reports; offer acceptance is followed by a legally compliant background check.