Senior Platform Engineer

As a Senior Platform Engineer, you will play a key role in executing the technical vision set by the Head of Infrastructure, with a strong focus on operating, stabilizing, and incrementally modernizing our on-premises infrastructure. The role balances hands-on ownership of existing platforms and legacy systems with the design and implementation of new, more automated and scalable capabilities.

Working closely with Software Engineering, you will help build and evolve internal platforms and shared services that improve reliability, security, and developer experience across both legacy and modern environments. Rather than a green-field cloud transformation, this role requires thoughtful integration - bridging current systems with newer platform approaches such as infrastructure-as-code, automation, and container-based workloads where appropriate.

Your work will focus on reducing operational friction, standardizing workflows, and introducing self-service capabilities in a way that respects regulatory, security, and on-prem constraints. By treating infrastructure and platforms as long-lived products, and by aligning closely with the Head of Infrastructure’s direction, you will help ensure a stable, secure foundation today while progressively enabling the next generation of our technical platform.

Responsibilities

• Introduce and operate Kubernetes-based workloads where appropriate, integrating them with existing on-prem infrastructure and operational processes.
• Incrementally modernize the platform by gradually migrating suitable services and workflows toward containerized and declarative approaches, without disrupting existing production systems.
• Design and evolve hybrid operational models, where legacy VM-based services and Kubernetes workloads coexist and are supported consistently.
• Operate, maintain, and incrementally modernize on-premises infrastructure and platforms, ensuring availability, security, and performance.
• Own day-to-day operations, including troubleshooting, patching, upgrades, and capacity management across Tomcat/Apache applications, PostgreSQL, and supporting services.
• Manage and evolve configuration management with Puppet and Ansible, ensuring consistent, secure, and auditable system changes.
• Operate and support Ceph storage, including capacity monitoring, performance analysis, and remediation of failures.
• Design, build, and operate internal platforms and shared services for application deployment and runtime operations, spanning VM-based and newer platform components.
• Support and execute application releases, working with both manual and automated processes and continuously improving reliability and repeatability.
• Build and maintain automation and tooling, primarily in Python, to reduce manual effort and improve operational consistency.
• Implement and operate monitoring, alerting, and incident response, using Zabbix and related observability tooling.
• Participate in an on-call rotation (weekends included), handling incidents, performing root-cause analysis, and driving corrective actions.
• Identify and address operational risks and improvement opportunities across application runtime, databases, storage, and CI/CD tooling.
• Ensure security, compliance, and audit requirements (ISO 27001, SOC 2, GDPR, etc.) are embedded into daily operations and system configurations.
• Maintain operational documentation, runbooks, and release procedures to support consistent execution and on-call readiness.
• Evaluate tools and automation with a pragmatic, on-prem-first approach, recommending changes that improve stability, security, and maintainability.

Requirements

• Fluent in English (written and spoken), German language skills are a plus.
• Practical experience with Kubernetes, including introducing and operating it incrementally in on-prem environments alongside existing platforms.
• Experience using Terraform for infrastructure-as-code to manage shared services and infrastructure components in a controlled, versioned manner.
• Hands-on experience operating on-prem Linux infrastructure in production, with ownership of availability, performance, and reliability.
• Strong experience with configuration management using Puppet and Ansible.
• Production experience operating and troubleshooting Apache and Tomcat application stacks.
• Solid operational experience with PostgreSQL, including administration, backups, performance considerations, and incident support.
• Hands-on experience operating Ceph storage, including capacity management, performance analysis, and failure handling.
• Experience supporting CI/CD and release processes, ideally using GitLab, across both manual and automated workflows.
• Familiarity with artifact repositories such as Artifactory.
• Strong automation and scripting skills, primarily using Python.
• Experience implementing and operating monitoring and observability tooling such as Zabbix and Grafana LGTM stack. Elastic Stack knowledge a plus.
• Experience participating in on-call rotations, incident response, root-cause analysis, and remediation.
• Solid understanding of on-prem networking concepts, including VLANs, load balancing, firewalls, and DNS.
• Familiarity with security and compliance requirements in regulated environments, including certificate management, TLS, and auditability.
• Experience improving and operating release and change management processes in production systems.
• Ability to produce and maintain clear operational documentation and runbooks for day-to-day operations and on-call support.
• Demonstrated ability to integrate legacy systems with modern platform approaches without disrupting production workloads.

Benefits

• Competitive salary and 5+ extra holidays (30 days)
• Great central office location in the heart of Zurich, including a roof terrace
• Great international team spirit with ambitious teams and an enormous drive to achieve our goals
• You will get to develop and learn within a highly talented and experienced team
• Work on products with a real impact: digital privacy, security and trust
• Annually international company offsite events in Portugal, Switzerland and Europe
• Available parking directly at the office
• Spacious office with leisure room and table football and complimentary snacks
• Work for a company committed to sustainability - our data centers operate climate-neutral