Senior DevOps & Operations Lead

Position: Senior DevOps & Operations Lead

Location: Winterthur/Zurich area (Hybrid, 3-4 days office)

Reporting: Head of Digital, Software & Controls (dotted line to Architecture Lead)

Start: ASAP

DevOps Leadership:

• Lead DevOps team across different locations
• Define and implement DevOps strategy for ESSENTIAL platform (cloud, on-prem or hybrid)
• Establish CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, and alerting
• Drive cloud cost optimization
• Implement security and compliance requirements (ISO 27001, GDPR, cybersecurity)
• Own production deployments and release management

Operations Management (depending on internal lead availability):

• Lead Operations team
• Ensure 24/7 operational readiness of ESSENTIAL platform (99.5% uptime SLA)
• Manage incident response, problem management, and escalations
• Define and track operational KPIs (availability, performance, customer satisfaction)
• Coordinate with customer support on critical issues
• Build runbooks and operational procedures

Must-Have Requirements

DevOps & Cloud Expertise:

• 6+ years in DevOps, SRE, or Platform Engineering roles
• Cloud experience (GKE, Cloud Run, Cloud Build, Monitoring), GVP and AWS and Azure also acceptable
• CI/CD tools: Cloud Build, GitHub Actions, or GitLab CI
• Monitoring & Observability: Cloud Monitoring, Prometheus/Grafana, or similar
• Security mindset: Secrets management, network security, compliance

Operations & Production:

• Experience running 24/7 production systems (B2B SaaS preferred)
• Incident management and post-mortem culture
• SLA/SLO/SLI definition and tracking
• Customer-facing operations experience
• Cost management and optimization

Leadership:

• 3+ years leading technical teams (10+ people)
• Ability to mentor junior engineers
• Experience with cross-functional collaboration (Product, Engineering, Support)
• Comfortable presenting to senior management

Communication & Culture:

• Fluent German and English (C1+ level both)
• Swiss or European work culture fit
• Hands-on mentality, not afraid to "get hands dirty"
• Pragmatic, business-outcome oriented

Nice-to-Have:

• IoT/Edge computing operations experience
• Manufacturing or industrial software background
• Experience with hardware/software hybrid products
• Kubernetes certification (CKA/CKAD)