Engineering Manager, SRE in Soest, Utrecht at Jobgether

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Engineering Manager, SRE based in Netherlands.

This is a hands-on engineering leadership role responsible for building a highly reliable foundation for a globally distributed technology platform.
You will lead a Site Reliability Engineering team while remaining deeply involved in technical direction and complex infrastructure challenges.
The role combines people leadership with expertise across Kubernetes, AWS, PostgreSQL, CI/CD, observability, infrastructure as code, and reliability engineering.
You will shape how the team balances operational excellence, incident response, reliability improvements, and longer-term engineering initiatives.
A key focus will be maturing SLOs, error budgets, observability, and reliability practices across the wider engineering organization.
You will also act as a trusted technical and organizational partner to engineering, security, and senior leadership.
The environment is fully remote and asynchronous, offering significant autonomy in a fast-growing, globally distributed organization.

• Lead and develop a Site Reliability Engineering team, owning the full career lifecycle of direct reports including onboarding, feedback, performance management, progression, coaching, and hiring.
• Establish a clear team direction and priorities aligned with broader company goals, balancing operational commitments with project delivery and protecting the team’s focus.
• Serve as the team's spokesperson across engineering and with senior leadership, communicating priorities, progress, risks, and technical challenges clearly.
• Own SRE delivery goals, deciding what the team commits to, how work is prioritized, and how operational responsibilities are managed.
• Design and maintain effective support rotations and on-call processes while strengthening incident response practices.
• Provide technical leadership across Kubernetes, AWS, PostgreSQL, DNS and TLS, CI infrastructure, and the broader infrastructure platform.
• Guide the development of reliability practices including SLOs, error budgets, observability, incident response, and post-incident improvements.
• Partner closely with Security on infrastructure threats, patching, controls, audits, and compliance obligations.
• Manage relationships with infrastructure and platform vendors, including renewals and commercial discussions with support from senior leadership.
• Remain hands-on enough to review technical work, challenge architectural decisions, participate credibly in incidents, and identify emerging reliability issues before they escalate.
• Build strong relationships across engineering and encourage teams to bring operational and reliability challenges forward early.
• Continuously improve team health, collaboration, conflict resolution, and retrospective practices.

• Proven experience leading an SRE, infrastructure, platform engineering, DevOps, or similarly focused technical team, with direct responsibility for performance and career development.
• Strong hands-on background in site reliability, DevOps, or cloud infrastructure engineering, with sufficient technical depth to review designs, challenge implementation decisions, and contribute during production incidents.
• Production experience with Kubernetes and AWS at meaningful scale, including the operational realities of running cloud infrastructure.
• Hands-on experience building, enabling, or scaling AI infrastructure and working with AI-related engineering workloads.
• Strong understanding of observability principles and practices, infrastructure as code with Terraform, and CI/CD platforms such as GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, or Jenkins.
• Experience with Docker, shell scripting, and production infrastructure operations.
• Proven ownership of reliability practices including incident response, on-call operations, SLOs, error budgets, and turning incidents into lasting engineering improvements.
• Experience working in regulated environments, with an understanding of infrastructure controls, compliance, and security requirements.
• Exceptional prioritization skills, particularly when operational workloads compete with project commitments.
• Excellent written communication and documentation skills, with the ability to lead effectively in a highly distributed and asynchronous environment.
• Strong relationship-building, collaboration, conflict-resolution, and stakeholder-management capabilities.
• A coaching-oriented leadership style, with evidence of developing engineers both technically and professionally.
• Strong judgment, accountability, adaptability, curiosity, and commitment to high-quality execution.
• Nice-to-have experience with Elixir, Java, Clojure, Node.js, Python, or another backend programming language.
• Additional desirable experience includes OpenTelemetry, distributed tracing, Honeycomb, PostgreSQL or Aurora performance optimization, connection pool management, query tuning, Linux systems administration, security, FinOps, and cloud cost management.
• Experience growing an engineering team from a small base and establishing a strong hiring bar is advantageous.
• Ability to work effectively across global teams and time zones.

• Annual salary range of USD $75,450–$169,700, with actual compensation determined by location, experience, skills, training, business needs, and market conditions.
• Fully remote, work-from-anywhere environment.
• Flexible working hours within an asynchronous work culture.
• Flexible paid time off.
• 16 weeks of paid parental leave.
• Budget for coworking spaces, learning, and wellness activities, including gym memberships.
• Mental health support services.
• Stock options.
• Home office budget and IT equipment.
• Global exposure through collaboration with colleagues across multiple continents.
• Opportunities to travel internationally and meet colleagues at company events.
• A high-autonomy environment where employees are encouraged to organize their schedules around their lives and personal commitments.
• Opportunity to influence the maturity of reliability engineering practices while working on complex infrastructure and platform challenges.