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

Paymenttools is on a mission to transform the payment landscape for retailers in Europe. With more than 4,4 billion visitors per year in our more than 15,000 REWE Group stores and travel agencies in 21 countries we know exactly what consumers and merchants need when exchanging goods for money. We strongly believe in making payments seamless and invisible, linking them with value added services within the framework of a reliable identity service. Our mantra: #wesolvepayn. We blend cutting-edge technology with stringent security to protect sensitive payment data while nurturing innovation in a cloud-native tech environment.

We are building a strong Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) function and are looking for a Senior Site Reliability Engineer who will help shape reliability as a core engineering discipline across the company. This is not a traditional operations role. It is an engineering role focused on building systems that scale, fail gracefully, and recover automatically, while continuously improving how we operate them.

To thrive in this role, you should approach challenges with an engineering mindset, automating before operating and focusing on outcomes that drive real impact. You are someone who takes ownership of ambiguous problems and stays curious about the inner workings of complex systems.You know when to dive deep and when to favor simplicity, showing a high level of pragmatism even in new domains. We don't expect you to be an expert in every tool we use; instead, we value your ability to analyze systems, ask the right questions, and build reliable solutions.

Your tasks:

• Partner closely with product and platform teams to design, build, and operate reliable, scalable, and secure distributed systems
• Drive the adoption of reliability principles such as SLOs, error budgets, and measurable service ownership
• Design and implement automation that reduces manual effort, eliminates repetitive tasks, and improves system resilience
• Contribute to system architecture decisions with a focus on failure modes, scalability limits, and performance characteristics
• Analyze incidents end-to-end, from symptoms to root causes, and drive systemic improvements rather than one-off fixes
• Participate in on-call rotations and lead incident response across multiple layers of the stack
• Continuously improve observability by defining meaningful signals, building insights, and enabling fast diagnosis
• Influence and mentor teams toward engineering practices that prioritize reliability, simplicity, and operability
• Ensure systems meet security, compliance, and regulatory requirements expected in payment environments

Your experience:

• Strong software engineering background with experience in building or operating large-scale distributed systems
• Proficiency in at least one programming language (e.g. Go, Java, Kotlin, or similar), with the ability to write production-quality code
• Solid understanding of computer science fundamentals such as data structures, algorithms, and complexity trade-offs
• Deep understanding of how systems work under the hood, including networking concepts (e.g. layering, routing, latency, failure modes), operating systems, and concurrency
• Experience working with cloud-native environments and modern infrastructure patterns (e.g. containerized workloads, declarative infrastructure, service-to-service communication)
• Strong intuition for debugging complex systems, especially under production pressure
• Experience with observability practices and tools, and the ability to define what "good" looks like in terms of system health
• Ability to reason about trade-offs between reliability, performance, and cost

Our benefits:

• Deutschland ticket, subsidized subscription
• 1.000 euro annual learning and development budget + internal training platforms
• Discounts on travel, fashion, technology,  and more through our corporate benefits 
• REWE discount card for discounts for REWE group retailers 
• JobRad, affordable bicycle leasing!
• Company pension plan 
• Insurance Services

Perks of working with us:

• We work in a hybrid environment
• Flexible working hours that fit your workflow, your time matters!
• Responsibility from day one
• Work with modern and agile software such as Google Workspace, Slack, Asana, Jira, Lattice, Miro and Confluence
• Company events including Hackathons and Company Days
• Ask us more about these!

We are looking forward to getting to know you - so, even if you feel that you don’t quite meet all the requirements, but the position still excites you and you think you would love to work with us, please reach out! We would still love to hear from you. We explicitly encourage applicants within groups that are underrepresented in tech spaces as of today. We value all kinds of backgrounds and walks of life.