Team Lead - Site Reliability Engineering (m/f/d) in Berlin or Konstanz

Help people make sense of their data. Build the cloud operations they can rely on.

At KNIME, we build software that helps people turn data into insights and put AI to work. As our cloud offering grows, we are building the internal team and engineering practices that keep it reliable, secure and efficient.

Join us as Team Lead – Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) to build our SaaS Operations team and own reliable service delivery on AWS and Azure across single-tenant and multi-tenant SaaS. You will initially spend most of your time engineering and operating alongside a small team. As the team grows, your focus will shift increasingly toward people management, planning and delegation, while retaining the technical command to guide decisions, review changes and lead complex incidents.

• Build and lead the team: Start predominantly hands-on, set the technical roadmap and coach engineers. Grow into hiring, performance development and delegation as the team expands, while retaining technical command.

• Own SaaS service delivery: Operate single-tenant and multi-tenant services on AWS and Azure. Lead incidents, changes and operational escalations with engineering and Support, and turn incident reviews into completed improvements.

• Make reliability measurable: Own observability, SLOs, alerts and runbooks. Track customer and tenant health, recovery, capacity and cost; use the results to prioritise reliability work and reduce repetitive operational effort.

• Run infrastructure and stateful services: Use Terraform and GitOps to manage provisioning, fleet upgrades, configuration drift and retirement. Own the operational lifecycle of Kubernetes, PostgreSQL, message brokers, object storage and shared services, including tested restores and recovery.

• Implement runtime and edge controls: Operate access, secrets, encryption, tenant/network isolation, patching and CDN/WAF controls with Security. Validate changes against customer journeys and investigate legitimate traffic blocked by protective rules.

• Own operational readiness: Apply release and service-acceptance gates agreed with engineering. Require remediation and pause or roll back unsafe changes under the agreed decision and escalation policy.

• Manage partners and take ownership: Run service reviews, track vendor SLAs/KPIs and resolve escalations. Bring operations in-house through knowledge transfer, shadowing, recovery drills and explicit handover acceptance criteria.

You will participate in and help build an out-of-hours on-call rotation as the internal team becomes ready, with our operations partner providing backup.

• You have run production Kubernetes (EKS or AKS) on AWS or Azure using Terraform and GitOps, and have hands-on experience in the other cloud.

•  You have led incidents and changes end to end, supported by observability, SLOs, actionable alerts and runbooks.

•  You have operated stateful services such as PostgreSQL, message brokers and object storage in production, including upgrades, backup restoration and recovery.

•  You have coached engineers and want to grow into hiring, performance development and ownership of the team roadmap, while retaining strong technical command.

•  You have held an external provider accountable for service outcomes or taken operations over from a partner, including knowledge transfer and operational acceptance.

•  You communicate clearly in English with engineering, Support, vendors and customers.

Useful experience

• CDN/WAF operations, such as Cloudflare or comparable services.

• OAuth/OIDC identity systems, such as Keycloak or Auth0, and security/compliance work such as SOC 2 evidence.

• Automation using Python or Go and IAC tools.

• Direct impact: Shape the operations team behind KNIME’s growing SaaS platform.

• Technical ownership: Influence how we deploy, protect, operate and scale.

• Learning and collaboration: Work with experienced engineers across cloud, data and AI.

• Flexibility: Hybrid working and flexible hours in Berlin or Konstanz.