Kubernetes Platform Tech Lead

About the role

As Kubernetes Platform Tech Lead, you will set the direction, own the outcomes, and lead the team building the infrastructure layer that every engineer at Trade Republic depends on to deploy and scale their services with confidence.

What you'll do

• Set the availability standard: Define the cluster topology and isolation model that gets mission-critical services to their availability targets — dedicated clusters per criticality tier, strict failure boundaries between platform and product workloads, and a disaster recovery posture that has been tested and proven.
• Own the networking architecture: Define the multi-account network fabric the entire fleet runs on — VPC design, private endpoints, cross-account connectivity, and the path toward cross-region and multi-cloud.
• Drive toward zero-touch fleet operations: Own the engineering roadmap that turns cluster and addon management into fully automated, self-healing workflows — where a new cluster is a resource definition and an addon rollout is a versioned profile applied across the entire fleet without manual intervention.
• Define the compute contract with product teams: Set the standards for how workloads run on the platform — resource policies, cluster profiles, workload isolation boundaries — and build the guardrails that prevent the noisy neighbour problem before it reaches production.
• Own the platform end to end: Participate in the on-call rotation, ensuring full end-to-end ownership of the systems you build and operate.
• Own the direction and drive it forward: Define the long-term Kubernetes platform strategy, drive cross-team initiatives from kickoff to delivery, and align infrastructure decisions with broader engineering, compliance, and cost goals.

What you'll need

• 5+ years of experience in infrastructure, platform engineering, or a related SRE/systems discipline, with a track record of technical leadership.
• Deep, hands-on Kubernetes expertise: cluster architecture, scaling, security, and HA design in production environments.
• Strong networking mastery: CNI, ingress, DNS, service mesh, and cross-region/cross-cloud connectivity.
• Proven experience operating multi-region, multi-cloud environments at scale.
• Experience automating the full cluster lifecycle — provisioning, upgrades, policy, and governance — with self-service enablement for developers.
• Solid backend engineering background — Go is preferred but any strong language is welcome.
• A track record of turning infrastructure best practices into opinionated standards that engineering teams actually adopt.
• The ability to work in a flexible hybrid setup, with 2-3 days a week in the office.