Site Reliability Engineering Lead

When travelers are searching for a hotel, we want the obvious choice to be trivago! Our leading metasearch engine is super fast and constantly optimized - enabling millions of travelers to compare hotel prices from hundreds of booking sites and find great deals in just a few clicks. We use cutting-edge technology, real-time auction, and machine learning techniques with petabytes of data to create an experience - time and money saved! In the lively city of Düsseldorf, we seize opportunities to learn everyday, innovate, and make an enduring mark on the travel industry. At trivago you will find those who aren't afraid of change but rather embrace it, turning every challenge into a pathway for growth. Join trivago, work with a great team, and grow with us!

Join us in making a difference

Our Hybrid Platform team builds and runs the foundation trivago's hotel search depends on: our Google Cloud environment, our own data centres, and the network that connects them to each other and our campus. As Site Reliability Engineering Lead, you'll lead a team of eight SREs and network engineers, reporting to our Head of SRE Platform, set its direction, and keep that foundation secure, reliable and ready for what comes next. This isn't a purely managerial role: you'll stay close to the technology, shape designs, tackle hard problems and help when things get tricky. You'll build a system the team can rely on, with clear reliability targets, automation over toil and sustainable on-call, and a culture where honest feedback and blameless learning are the norm. trivago is a place where ambition and support go hand in hand. Our leads invest time in AI workflows every day and help their teams grow with new tools.

Ready to shape our hybrid future? Apply now!

How you'll make an impact:

• Own the strategy and roadmap for our hybrid infrastructure across GCP, data centre and campus, deciding which workloads run where and explaining the trade-offs clearly to leadership and non-technical stakeholders.

• Stay hands-on where it counts: review and shape architecture, get involved in critical troubleshooting, and contribute to the automation and infrastructure as code your team relies on.

• Keep the platform secure, available, performant and cost-efficient, with clear reliability targets the team and its users can measure against.

• Make the platform easy for product teams to use, with self-service where it makes sense, clear interfaces and documentation people actually read.

• Build a healthy on-call and incident culture: sustainable rotations, blameless postmortems, and root causes that get fixed.

• Manage hardware lifecycle, vendors, contracts and the team's budget across data centre, network and cloud.

• Build a winning team by leading hiring, coaching and career development, and by giving regular, honest feedback so the team has the right capabilities to drive transformation.

• Create clarity on team priorities, translate strategic objectives into actionable plans and team OKRs, and hold the team accountable for steady execution, staying agile as priorities evolve.

What you'll need to thrive:

• Hands-on experience across cloud (ideally GCP) and on-premise data centre and network infrastructure, including a solid understanding of TCP/IP, routing protocols such as BGP and OSPF, and modern data centre architectures such as IP fabric.

• Proven experience leading, coaching or mentoring engineering teams in infrastructure, network or platform engineering, with a track record of helping others grow while delivering results.

• The ability to adapt your leadership style situationally, knowing when to direct, coach, support or delegate based on each person's needs, and the confidence to communicate with both engineers and executives.

• A genuine learning mindset: you approach new technologies and challenges with curiosity, seek out feedback, and keep developing yourself and your team.

• A performance mindset: you set ambitious reliability goals, base decisions on data about capacity, cost and reliability, and have the resilience to see them through, including as part of the escalation path for critical incidents.

• A hands-on, daily commitment to using AI tools in real workflows, building on experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform, Ansible or similar), Kubernetes and CI/CD, and a drive to enable your team to do the same, treating AI fluency as a core leadership expectation, not an add-on.

Stand out with:

• Experience with Juniper routers, switches and firewalls.

• Google Cloud networking and hybrid connectivity, such as Interconnect and VPN.

• Experience with data centre hardware, colocation and hardware vendor management.

• Cloud cost management or FinOps experience.

• Experience leading migrations between on-prem and cloud, in either direction.

• Open source involvement.

Our technology stack:

Google Cloud, Juniper, Kubernetes, Istio, Terraform, Ansible, Helm, Prometheus, Kafka, Linux, Rancher, Harvester, Cilium

Not ticking every box? We still want to hear from you. Apply, tell us what motivates you, and you could be a great match-now or in the future. Your application does not need to include a photo.

Recruitment process:

• Screening call with recruiter 

• Technical Interview with two team members

• Profile Dynamics assessment with recruiter 

• Final Interview with team and department leads

Want to know more about life at trivago? Check out what our colleagues say on kununu and Glassdoor.

What you can look forward to:

trivago is a place where technical ambition meets genuine investment in your growth - here's what you can look forward to:

Own your stack.

We give engineers real agency over technical decisions. You'll work in small, autonomous teams with direct access to production, where your choices have measurable impact and your input actively shapes how we build.

Stay sharp with dedicated learning opportunities.

Beyond our campus library and free online courses, engineers get access to specialist technical meetups, internal guilds, architecture reviews, certifications, specialist tools, and hands-on experimentation time.

Ship fast, learn faster.

We run a continuous deployment culture with short feedback loops. You'll move from idea to production in days - with the autonomy, tooling, and trust to iterate quickly and own your outcomes end to end.

AI-native engineering environment.

We actively invest in AI tooling for developers - including coding assistants, AI-powered workflows, and dedicated experimentation time. We build it into how we work.

As you grow, so do we.

This is why at trivago, we prioritize your development, offer personalized coaching through Nilo, and provide workshops, educational meetups, conferences, free online learning courses, and access to a fully-equipped campus library.

Enjoy your office days.

Use your daily canteen budget to share lunch with colleagues in our canteen, help yourself to complimentary snacks and drinks in our kitchens, choose from a variety of fitness options with our on-site gym, sports classes, and Urban Sports Club membership, and enjoy the comfort of ergonomic desks and focused work areas.

Moving to join us?

No problem. You can count on the visa support from our talent support team, a relocation package, interest-free newcomer loan, free language classes, regular team and many company-wide events to build experiences together.

Life happens.

We offer self-determined vacation (with a minimum of 25 vacation days), flexible working hours, up to 2 work from home days weekly. Additionally you can work remotely from a different location, within Germany or selected countries abroad for up to 20 days per year. You also get free access to the Heycare platform for personalized nanny assistance, and an on-campus kids room.

Thank you for considering a career at trivago! Our commitment to fostering an inclusive and enriching environment for all talents is at the heart of what we do. We understand that embarking on a new job opportunity is a blend of excitement and curiosity. Should any questions arise before you apply, feel free to reach out to us at [email protected]. Join us in our mission to make a positive impact on global travel, we look forward to your application!