Job Description
Please note that these positions are based in London, Berlin or Paris — relocation support is provided if required.
THE BEST WORK OF YOUR CAREER
Trade Republic is the largest savings platform in Europe — we operate in 18 countries, serving +10 million customers who trust us with over €150B in assets. But we’re striving for more.
We have a bold mission to empower everyone to build wealth with easy, safe, and free access to financial systems. You will have the opportunity to grow your career by collaborating with a team of outstanding talents and state of the art technology to build a lasting, positive future for millions.
ABOUT PLATFORM ENGINEERING
Platform Engineering is the backbone of Trade Republic’s engineering velocity. Our mission is to build scalable platforms for a Europe-scale bank — serving internal engineers, and building in-house control planes for managing the bank’s infrastructure. We’re a ~50-person Platform team focused on one thing: enabling product engineers to move fast and operate autonomously by default.
We build self-service platforms, golden paths, and opinionated tooling so that over 400 engineers can ship with confidence. From Kubernetes fleet management and CI/CD to an internal Developer Hub built on Backstage, our work underpins every trade, savings plan, and card payment that flows through the platform.
THE KUBERNETES PLATFORM JOURNEY Trade Republic runs a growing fleet of Kubernetes clusters across multiple AWS accounts and environments, underpinning every service that millions of customers depend on. Managing that fleet at the pace the business demands — with the reliability and compliance bar a regulated financial institution requires — made it clear that treating clusters as manually managed infrastructure was no longer an option.
We changed that. We built a hub-and-spoke fleet management platform — ClusterAPI for cluster lifecycle, Crossplane for the infrastructure control plane, Sveltos for addon orchestration, all driven by GitOps from a single source of truth. A new cluster is now a single resource definition. Addons are versioned packages, deployed automatically to every cluster in the fleet. Operational complexity no longer grows with the number of clusters.
The foundation is in place. Now we need to take it further: hardening the platform, expanding to multi-region, pushing availability targets to meet mission-critical service requirements, and making the fleet truly self-healing by default. You will lead that next chapter.
WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING
As a Kubernetes Senior Engineer, you will build and operate the infrastructure layer that every engineer at Trade Republic depends on to deploy and scale their services with confidence.
- Build for availability: Implement and improve the cluster topology and isolation model that gets mission-critical services to their availability targets - dedicated clusters per criticality tier, strict failure boundaries between platform and product workloads, and disaster recovery procedures you help test and prove.
- Work across the networking fabric: Build and maintain the multi-account network the fleet runs on - VPC design, private endpoints, and cross-account connectivity - and contribute to the path toward cross-region and multi-cloud. Make sure services communicate reliably and securely wherever they run.
- Push toward zero-touch fleet operations: Build the automation that turns cluster and addon management into self-healing workflows, freeing the team from repetitive operational toil so our time goes toward raising the platform’s reliability and capabilities rather than keeping it running.
- Strengthen the compute contract with product teams: Implement the resource policies, cluster profiles, and workload isolation boundaries that define how workloads run on the platform, and build the guardrails that prevent noisy-neighbours to compromise resiliency.
- Own what you build end to end: Participate in the on-call rotation, taking operational ownership of the systems you build and run.
- Contribute to the platform’s direction: Bring strong technical input to the Kubernetes platform’s evolution, take features from kickoff to delivery, and weigh infrastructure decisions against reliability, compliance, and cost.
WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR
- 5+ years of experience in infrastructure, platform engineering, or a related SRE/systems discipline.
- Deep, hands-on Kubernetes expertise: cluster architecture, scaling, security, and HA design in production environments.
- Strong networking fundamentals: CNI, ingress, DNS, service mesh, and cross-region/cross-cloud connectivity.
- Experience operating multi-region and/or multi-cloud environments in production.
- Experience automating the cluster lifecycle - provisioning, upgrades, policy, and governance - with self-service enablement for developers.
- Solid backend engineering background - Go is preferred but any strong language is welcome.
- A pragmatic approach to applying infrastructure best practices in a way engineering teams actually adopt.
- Ability to contribute to architectural decisions and clearly communicate trade-offs.
- The ability to work in a flexible hybrid setup, with 2-3 days a week in the office.
WHY YOU SHOULD APPLY NOW
Our culture rewards ownership, excellence, and high energy. We care deeply about outcomes and hold each other accountable — we’re here to win and fix one of the largest challenges Europeans face — closing the pension gap and democratising wealth. If this gets you fired up, reach out!
We believe it’s our team’s varied identities and backgrounds that make us sharper and stronger. We’re committed to creating an environment where everyone feels respected and has equal opportunity to thrive in their careers. For any questions on DEI during the interview process, reach out to your recruitment partner.
