Tech Lead

Tech Lead Company Orcrist builds the Orcrist Intelligence Platform (OIP), a secure, Kubernetes-native system deployed across cloud, on-prem, and air-gapped environments. Our Platform team owns Kubernetes, GitOps, observability, and reliability for every customer mission. We enable defense, law enforcement, and enterprise teams to turn mission-critical data into actionable intelligence—securely and at scale. Role Lead the Platform team as the technical authority for all SREs. You’ll stay hands-on, mentor 3–6 SREs, define platform roadmap, and establish SRE practices that enable product teams to ship faster while meeting compliance and security baselines. You aren’t just managing infrastructure; you’re building a product that empowers every developer in the company. What you'll do Lead and mentor 3–6 SREs: conduct code reviews, architecture workshops, and career development; grow seniors into leads. Define platform roadmap and technical standards: align with product delivery needs, compliance requirements, and reference architectures. Establish SRE practices: SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, incident management protocols, post-mortem culture, and toil reduction. Ship critical platform features: automation tooling, observability improvements, GitOps workflows, and developer self-service capabilities. Build self-service internal developer platform: release pipelines, feature flags, observability tooling, and documentation reducing cognitive load. Lead incident response, on-call rotations, and reliability improvements; drive blameless post-mortems and continuous platform hardening. Partner with Security, Product, and Customer Engineering teams on platform enablement, deployment design, and operational readiness. About you 8+ years platform/SRE engineering with 2+ years in team leadership or technical lead role. Deep production Kubernetes expertise (multi-cluster, air-gapped, GitOps: Argo CD, Terraform). Strong SRE philosophy: SLOs/SLIs, error budgets, incident management, observability (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana). Experience with security/compliance automation: policy-as-code, zero-trust networking, secrets management (Vault). Proven track record of mentoring SREs, establishing technical standards, and building “Platform-as-a-Product” culture. Comfortable operating in regulated or air-gapped environments; documentation-focused and automation-first mindset. Eligible to work in Germany; EU/NATO citizenship preferred for export control. Nice‑to‑haves German language (B1+) and experience with BSI C5, ISO 27001, STIG, or NATO compliance frameworks. Experience with air-gapped container registries (Harbor), supply chain security (Cosign, SLSA), and service mesh (Istio/Linkerd). Knowledge of internal developer portals (Backstage, Port) and platform engineering best practices. Certifications (CKA/CKAD/CKS, CISSP, Google Cloud Professional Architect) are a plus. OSS contributions or speaking/writing on platform engineering, SRE practices, or Kubernetes ecosystem. What we offer Modern stack: Kubernetes, Argo CD, Terraform, Prometheus, Vault, Kyverno, GitOps, OpenTelemetry. Remote-first in Germany with regular Berlin meetups and 30 days vacation. Mission-driven product with meaningful user impact across defense and public safety. Equipment + home office budget, professional development support. Direct impact on critical missions across private and public-sector customers.