Lead DevOps Platform Engineer

Job Location: hybrid in Bucharest

Recruitment process:

• HR discussion
  
• Technical interview X 2

Role description:

• Own the technical vision and target architecture of our new GCP-based DevOps Platform, anchored on the Platform-as-a-Product principles of self-service, repeatability, and governance.
• Shape the SAP integration architecture on the GCP side — hybrid real-time (Pub/Sub, Apigee) and batch (Dataflow, BigQuery) — in close collaboration with the SAP Integration Specialist and SAP Public Cloud teams.
• Establish architecture decision processes, RFC culture, and technical standards across the platform team.
• Act as the senior technical counterpart to the Head of Platform, translate platform strategy into concrete engineering roadmaps, and represent the platform in technology and IT strategy discussions.
• Mentor and grow the hybrid platform engineering team; partner closely with developer experience colleagues to ensure golden paths actually solve developer problems.
• Champion the cultural shift from strict Dev/Ops separation to DevOps teams with end- to-end ownership — supported by a strong platform and clear interfaces.

Profile: 

• Several years of hands-on experience as a Tech Lead, Principal Engineer, or Lead Platform Engineer in a product-oriented engineering organization, ideally with end-to-end ownership of a developer platform on a public cloud.
• Deep technical expertise in Google Cloud Platform (GKE, IAM, networking, Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, BigQuery, Apigee) — or strong equivalent experience on AWS/Azure with a clear path to GCP.
• Proven track record of designing and operating Kubernetes-based platforms at scale, including multi-cluster and multi-region setups.
• Strong command of Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform) and modern cluster-API /GitOps approaches such as Crossplane, Argo CD, or Flux.
• Experience shaping a Platform-as-a-Product approach with golden paths, self-service capabilities, and developer portals (e.g. Backstage).
• Solid understanding of CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI preferred), container security, secret management, and observability stacks (e.g. Prometheus, Loki, Grafana).
• Familiarity with hybrid cloud topologies and event-driven integration patterns; bonus for exposure to SAP integration landscapes (SAP Integration Suite, S/4HANA).
• Strong architectural judgment — able to balance speed, governance, vendor lock-in, and total cost of ownership in real-world trade-offs.
• Demonstrated ability to lead engineers technically, mentor across seniority levels, and raise the bar through code reviews, RFCs, and architecture decision records.
• Excellent stakeholder communication across engineering, security, business, and external partners — comfortable presenting at C-level and pairing with developers on the same day.
• Fluent English required; German or Romanian is a plus.

Why this job?

• A green-field opportunity to shape a new GCP DevOps Platform from day one for one of Europe's largest family-owned retailers, with workloads spanning SAP, e-commerce shop, and internal applications.