Lead Tech SRE

Job description

**This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Lead Tech SRE based in Netherlands.** We are looking for a hands-on technical leader to own the architecture, delivery, and continuous improvement of a growing cloud orchestration platform. In this fully remote role, you will lead a small Site Reliability Engineering team while remaining deeply involved in infrastructure design, automation, and incident response. You will build and scale a fleet of dedicated customer environments on Google Cloud, ensuring reliability, security, and operational consistency as the platform moves from Beta toward General Availability. Working closely with the CTO, platform engineering, and security teams, you will define the technical roadmap and translate complex requirements into practical solutions. You will have significant ownership over architectural decisions, delivery standards, observability, and cloud cost optimization. This is an engineering leadership opportunity for someone who enjoys setting direction while actively building and operating production systems. ### Accountabilities - Own the target architecture of the managed cloud platform on Google Cloud Platform (GCP), including dedicated customer environments, clusters, networks, databases, queues, infrastructure templates, and regional deployment strategy. - Define the architectural roadmap and guide the platform's evolution from Beta to General Availability, balancing customer isolation, reliability, scalability, and infrastructure costs. - Write and maintain technical specifications, design documents, RFCs, and Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), clearly explaining technical trade-offs and implementation choices. - Define Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and error budgets for services and service tiers, using them to guide engineering priorities. - Lead technical delivery across a team of three, including yourself, by breaking down architectural plans into actionable work, assigning responsibilities, reviewing implementation, and removing blockers. - Establish engineering standards for Terraform modules, Helm charts, infrastructure configuration, and GitOps practices. - Automate the complete customer-instance lifecycle, including provisioning, upgrades, scaling, backups, migrations, and decommissioning. - Own the deployment and release strategy using ArgoCD and GitHub Actions, implementing progressive rollouts, rollback mechanisms, and safe upgrades across customer environments. - Build and maintain an end-to-end observability stack covering metrics, logs, traces, and alerting to identify and resolve issues proactively. - Lead on-call operations and incident response, including rotation planning, runbooks, blameless postmortems, and implementation of corrective actions. - Plan infrastructure capacity for variable workloads and ensure autoscaling strategies remain effective and reliable. - Drive cloud cost optimization through FinOps practices, including customer-level cost visibility, resource right-sizing, committed-use discounts, and appropriate use of spot instances. - Strengthen platform security in collaboration with the security engineer, covering network policies, workload identity, secrets management, and audit trails in support of SOC 2 expectations. - Collaborate with core platform engineering to identify product improvements that simplify cloud operations and improve platform reliability. - Lead the technical milestones for the first six months, including architecture assessment, GA specifications and SLOs, automated customer provisioning, observability coverage, and safe upgrade capabilities. ### Requirements: - At least 8 years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, platform engineering, or infrastructure engineering, including a minimum of 2 years leading technical direction for a team or platform. - Deep, production-grade Kubernetes expertise, including experience operating clusters at scale and managing upgrades, configuration drift, networking, and resource allocation. - Strong hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform, particularly GKE, IAM, VPC networking, private clusters, load balancing, and managed data services. - Expert-level Terraform skills, including the design of reusable module structures and state management approaches that support multiple identical customer environments. - Proven ability to define technical architecture, write detailed specifications, evaluate trade-offs, and translate designs into executable engineering plans. - Demonstrated experience coordinating technical delivery, reviewing implementation, and guiding a small engineering team. - Strong operational experience with on-call rotations, incident management, postmortems, and implementing lasting reliability improvements. - Background operating SaaS products for paying customers, with direct responsibility for production reliability and meaningful SLOs. - Fluent English and the ability to work independently and collaboratively in a fully remote international environment. - Pragmatic engineering judgment, with the ability to choose straightforward, maintainable solutions and clearly explain technical decisions. - **Nice to have:** Experience operating workloads that execute untrusted or user-defined code, including sandboxing, gVisor, or node-pool isolation. - Experience building or operating control planes for dedicated customer environments using Kubernetes operators, Crossplane, GKE Fleet, Config Sync, or custom provisioning systems. - Practical GCP FinOps experience, including customer-level cost attribution, committed-use discounts, and spot node pools. - Exposure to SOC 2 or ISO 27001 audits from an infrastructure or platform engineering perspective. - Familiarity with workflow orchestration platforms such as Airflow, Temporal, or similar technologies, or experience with the JVM in production. - Experience with technologies such as Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Helm, ArgoCD, GitHub Actions, OpenTelemetry, Elastic, Prometheus, Grafana, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch, Redis, Kafka, and AMQP. ### Benefits: - Fully remote working arrangement, with the flexibility to work from anywhere. - Access to coworking spaces worldwide for additional flexibility. - Health coverage, including medical, dental, and vision benefits. - Home-office equipment provided to support a comfortable and productive remote setup. - Opportunity to lead the technical direction of a growing cloud platform and take ownership of major architectural decisions. - Hands-on engineering leadership within a small, collaborative team. - Close collaboration with senior technical leadership and platform engineering specialists.