Kleinanzeigen is Germany's most-visited classifieds platform — and one of Europe's largest digital marketplaces. Hundreds of engineers depend on a shared platform to build, deploy, and run the products that reach roughly 50% of the German internet population. The SRE & DevOps team is the team that makes that platform real — provisioning the infrastructure, owning the pipelines, defining the standards, and ensuring everything holds together at scale.
We are looking for a senior Engineering Manager to lead this area. You will manage two teams totalling approximately 10 engineers, work in close partnership with a deeply experienced Technical Product Manager who brings strong domain expertise across the full platform engineering scope, and report to the Head of Engineering for Platform Engineering.
This is a high-impact role with real scope. You will be the person who shapes the team's direction and momentum, defines the technical strategy, and ensures the platform delivers genuine leverage to the engineers who depend on it — while keeping your team healthy, motivated, and growing.
CONTEXT: WHERE WE ARE AND WHERE WE ARE GOING
Platform Engineering at Kleinanzeigen is raising the bar on what internal platform means in practice. The SRE & DevOps team sits at the centre of this: owning the infrastructure layer, the delivery pipelines, and the self-service surface that lets product engineers move fast without creating chaos.
The right Engineering Manager will help define what this team becomes — not just manage what it already is. That means coming in with a clear perspective on what good looks like in platform engineering, a commitment to continuous improvement, and the credibility to bring both your team and your stakeholders along.
The platform runs at scale, with real reliability expectations. We are simultaneously improving foundations and shipping new capabilities. This is a role for someone who is energised by complexity, continuous improvement, and the opportunity to shape what comes next.
Responsibilities
YOUR ROLE
People & Team Leadership
- Manage, mentor, and develop two teams totalling approximately 10 engineers — supporting their growth, wellbeing, and career progression through structured 1:1s, regular feedback, and meaningful development conversations.
- Run a tight and effective team operating rhythm: planning, retrospectives, incident reviews, and cross-team alignment.
- Hire thoughtfully — maintain a high bar for talent and contribute to shaping the team's capabilities over time.
- Own performance management across the team — set clear expectations, identify and address performance gaps early, and ensure every engineer has a meaningful development path.
- Create the conditions for your team to do their best work: clear expectations, psychological safety, and a culture where raising risks early is the norm.
Technical Strategy & Execution
- Partner with the Technical Product Manager — who brings deep domain expertise across the platform engineering space — to define the roadmap and translate it into a well-sequenced, realistic delivery plan across both teams.
- Set and maintain a high standard for reliability, scalability, and operational excellence across all areas the team owns.
- Lead architectural decisions and technical trade-offs — leaning on your own engineering background to scrutinise, validate, and guide without owning every solution.
- Ensure the team's work creates leverage for the broader engineering organisation, not just for itself.
- Actively promote the use of AI tools to enhance the team's efficiency and effectiveness — from accelerating delivery to improving operational practices.
Stakeholder & Cross-Team Collaboration
- Act as the primary interface between your team and the rest of Platform Engineering leadership.
- Build strong working relationships with the product engineering teams who depend on your platform — understand their friction and reflect it back into your team's priorities.
- Communicate clearly upward, downward, and across — including when things are not going according to plan.
Operational Excellence
- Own the reliability posture of the platform: define SLOs, lead incident response, and build a strong postmortem culture.
- Continuously improve how the team works — from on-call practices to deployment processes to documentation standards.
- Balance shipping new capabilities against the ongoing health of existing systems — and make that trade-off visible and legible to stakeholders.
WHAT THIS ROLE LOOKS LIKE IN PRACTICE
You will stay close to the technical work — not writing production code daily, but technically credible enough to challenge architectural decisions, evaluate trade-offs, and build credibility with senior engineers. A background in SRE, DevOps, or platform engineering — not just adjacent engineering management — is essential.
You will bring your own perspective on what good looks like and make progress in ambiguous situations — building alignment where needed, and moving forward with clarity when the path is yours to define.
Requirements
QUALIFICATIONS
We know that some candidates won't meet every requirement listed here. If this role excites you and you bring most of what we're looking for, we encourage you to apply.
Required
- Proven experience as an Engineering Manager in a DevOps, SRE, or Platform Engineering context — you have led teams that own shared infrastructure and are accountable for reliability.
- Strong working knowledge of AWS — infrastructure provisioning, IAM, networking, cost management — you can hold a substantive technical conversation at every level.
- Solid understanding of Kubernetes and container orchestration at scale.
- Hands-on background with CI/CD systems and delivery pipelines (e.g. GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, or equivalent).
- Track record of growing engineers: through structured feedback, coaching, and well-constructed development conversations.
- Excellent communication skills — you translate between technical depth and business context fluently, and write clearly under pressure.
- Experience managing in environments with real reliability requirements — you understand what it means to own an on-call rota and the culture that sustains it.
Strong Advantage
- Experience building or scaling self-service platform capabilities and developer tooling for engineering teams.
- Familiarity with service mesh, traffic routing, or networking technologies (e.g. Envoy, Istio, AWS networking primitives).
- Experience managing through organisational change or significant scope transitions.
- Familiarity with platform maturity frameworks or developer experience measurement (DORA, SPACE, DX Core 4, or similar).
Profile
- You surface concerns early — including in rooms with more seniority than you.
- You distinguish clearly between technical direction (which you set collaboratively) and technical execution (which belongs to your engineers).
- You are as comfortable in a roadmap conversation as in an incident postmortem.
- You believe a good platform team is invisible to the engineers who depend on it — and you measure success accordingly.
- You invest in the people around you as deliberately as you invest in the technical platform.
- You know when to align before deciding and when to decide and communicate.
Benefits
💚 Your benefits at Kleinanzeigen At Kleinanzeigen, we care about our people — their wellbeing, growth, and life beyond work. Our benefits are designed to support you holistically, giving you flexibility and opportunities to thrive.
✨ Flexibility
Flexible working time (hybrid)
20 days “work from anywhere”
Paid additional parental leave for both parents
Extra paid days off for special occasions (e.g. your wedding or a move)
❤️🩹 Wellbeing & Support
Confidential support & coaching for you and your loved ones
Annual company sports events
Pension and life insurance
📚 Growth & Development
🛍️ Perks & Everyday benefits
Corporate benefits and exclusive discounts
An attractive referral program
Transportation allowance
Free shipping on Kleinanzeigen Direktkauf
Kleinanzeigen is an equal opportunity employer that values diversity and inclusion. We welcome people of all backgrounds, races, religions, colours, national origins, gender identities, sexual orientation, ages, marital status, or disability.
If this role sparks your interest but you’re not sure you meet every single requirement, we’d still love to hear from you anyway.