Senior Site Reliability Engineer / Cloud Operations Engineer (m/f/d)

Job summary

Thales, in partnership with Google Cloud, is establishing a new, 100% German business unit to provide a locally and autonomously operated “Trusted Cloud” for German companies and public administrations. This role involves operating and maintaining mission-critical sovereign cloud services with high availability targets, monitoring service health, and resolving complex production incidents. The position requires participation in a 24/7 on-call rotation and collaboration with international teams to drive long-term solutions and improve platform reliability.

Qualifications

• Several years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering, Cloud Operations, DevOps, Platform Engineering, Infrastructure Engineering, Production Support, Network Operations (NOC), Technical Operations, or a comparable role.
• Experience operating and supporting business-critical production systems with demanding uptime and availability requirements.
• Strong troubleshooting and incident management skills in complex technical environments.
• Experience monitoring, operating, and maintaining distributed systems, cloud platforms, infrastructure services, or large-scale applications.
• Familiarity with reliability engineering concepts, observability, monitoring, alerting, incident response, and root cause analysis.
• Experience working with automation, scripting, operational tooling, or Infrastructure-as-Code approaches.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with a structured and methodical approach.
• Professional proficiency in both German and English.
• Willingness to participate in a regular on-call rotation.
• Curiosity, adaptability, and a strong desire to learn and work with hyperscale cloud technologies.

Responsibilities

• Operate and maintain mission-critical sovereign cloud services with availability targets of 99.99% and above.
• Monitor service health, reliability, scalability, latency, and performance using Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and Service Level Objectives (SLOs).
• Investigate, troubleshoot, and resolve complex production incidents across large-scale distributed cloud environments.
• Participate in a structured 24/7 on-call rotation (approximately one week every six weeks) to ensure continuous service availability.
• Collaborate with Site Reliability Engineers, Cloud Infrastructure Specialists, and Product Experts across international teams to mitigate incidents and drive long-term solutions.
• Build a deep understanding of Google's cloud technologies and distributed systems through an intensive training program covering technologies such as Borg, Colossus, Spanner, and other core GCP components.
• Drive operational excellence by creating and maintaining technical documentation, standardizing incident response procedures, and continuously improving operational playbooks.
• Lead and contribute to post-incident reviews, root cause analyses, and the implementation of preventive measures to improve platform reliability.
• Identify opportunities for automation and contribute to improving operational efficiency, scalability, compliance, and service reliability.
• Support the operation of highly secure cloud environments designed to meet stringent regulatory and sovereignty requirements.

Skills

Languages

Work schedule

Relocation