Staff Engineer, Operational Excellence

<h3><strong>Change the way the world travels</strong></h3> <p>Be part of the GetYourGuide journey and connect people with unforgettable travel experiences worldwide. Since 2009, millions of travelers have booked unique activities with us in over 12,000 cities. Our headquarters in Berlin is supported by local offices across the globe, from New York to Bangkok.&nbsp;</p> <p>Ready to join a diverse community of over 850 fellow explorers dedicated to revolutionizing the travel experience industry? Check out <a href="https://www.getyourguide.careers/">getyourguide.careers</a> to learn more.</p> <h3><strong>Team mission</strong></h3> <p>Incidents interrupt operations, drain team productivity, and erode user trust. As a member of the Operational Excellence team, you will help GetYourGuide move toward a world of fewer interruptions and higher user trust — by preventing incidents before they happen and enabling teams to resolve them faster when they do.</p> <p>As we push boldly into AI-powered experiences, we don't ignore the risks that increased output velocity creates. You will be a key part of ensuring our engineering organization moves fast with confidence, so our customers continue to have great experiences every time.</p> <p>Beyond reliability, you will drive observability and cost efficiency — building the tooling, culture, and practices that make operational excellence a shared standard across all product teams.</p> <h3><strong>Your mission</strong></h3> <p>You will act as an "engineer for the engineers" — partnering with product teams to raise the bar on reliability, speed, and confidence in their systems.</p> <p><strong>Incident management &amp; reliability</strong></p> <ul> <li>Drive down incident frequency, MTTD and MTTR</li> <li>Lead post-incident reviews and translate learnings into systemic improvements</li> <li>Build tooling and runbooks that enable teams to diagnose and resolve production issues faster</li> <li>Champion a culture of blameless incident handling and continuous improvement</li> <li>Participate in the infrastructure on-call rotation</li> </ul> <p><strong>Observability &amp; production confidence</strong></p> <ul> <li>Advance our Datadog-based observability practice — metrics, logs, traces, dashboards, and alerting</li> <li>Ensure teams have meaningful SLOs and actionable alerts — not alert fatigue</li> <li>Enable production debugging capabilities so engineers can triage issues without needing a specialist</li> </ul> <p><strong>Change confidence &amp; release quality</strong></p> <ul> <li>Improve change failure rate by helping teams invest in the right automated test coverage and pre-production validation</li> <li>Reduce the cost and risk of deployments through better tooling, feature flagging, and progressive rollout practices</li> </ul> <p><strong>Platform enablement</strong></p> <ul> <li>Design and maintain paved paths - well - documented golden paths for development, observability, testing, and incident response so product teams can do the right things by default</li> <li>Work hands-on with product teams using Java and React to help them improve system design, testability, and operational hygiene</li> <li>Leverage Kubernetes, AWS, and Istio expertise to guide teams on infrastructure best practices</li> <li>Identify cost optimization opportunities and drive efficiency improvements across services</li> <li>Leverage AI tooling to accelerate incident response, improve developer workflows, and scale operational practices</li> </ul> <h3><strong>Your toolkit</strong></h3> <ul> <li>Deep understanding of observability tooling — we use Datadog (metrics, APM, logs, dashboards)</li> <li>Proven experience reducing MTTD, MTTR, and change failure rate; DORA metrics are not just acronyms to you</li> <li>Strong coding skills in Java; comfortable reading and contributing in Go across infrastructure contexts; enough frontend context to collaborate with React / Vue teams</li> <li>Experience with Kubernetes, AWS, and service mesh technologies (Istio/Envoy)</li> <li>Solid understanding of distributed systems, networking, and container technology</li> <li>Hands-on experience with CI/CD, automated testing strategies, and build systems</li> <li>Ability to influence engineers and teams without direct authority — you raise standards by coaching, not dictating</li> <li>Excellent written and verbal communication skills in English</li> <li>Positive, proactive team player who is passionate about operational excellence and helps others deliver</li> </ul> <h3>What sets you apart</h3> <ul> <li>You have led company-wide initiatives to measurably improve DORA metrics — specifically MTTD, MTTR and change failure rate</li> <li>Identified systemic gaps in automated testing and driven improvements that led to meaningful reductions in change failure rate and production incidents</li> <li>You have embedded operational excellence practices into the culture of product engineering teams, not just platform teams</li> <li>You have driven meaningful cost-reduction outcomes through architectural or operational improvements</li> <li>You have hands-on experience integrating AI into real operational workflows and can point to measurable outcomes from doing so</li> </ul> <h3><strong>How we’ll make your career journey extraordinary</strong></h3> <ul> <li>Annual personal growth budget and mentorship programs for continuous learning and development</li> <li>Work from anywhere in the world for 40 days per year</li> <li>Flexible working arrangements to support work-life balance</li> <li>Opportunities to collaborate and socialize with team members through quarterly team events and yearly company-wide events</li> <li>Monthly transportation and fitness budget</li> <li>Discounts for you, your friends, and family on GetYourGuide activities</li> <li>Language reimbursement program</li> <li>Health and wellness benefits</li> </ul> <p>And more…</p> <h3><strong>How to apply</strong></h3> <p>Submit your CV/resume in English using the form below. For tips and insights into our hiring process and culture, check out ‘<a href="https://www.getyourguide.careers/how-we-hire">how we hire</a>’ and ‘<a href="https://www.getyourguide.careers/life-at-getyourguide">life at GetYourGuide</a>’. If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch at <a href="mailto:jobs@getyourguide.com">jobs@getyourguide.com</a>.</p> <h3><strong>We’re an equal opportunities employer</strong></h3> <p>Our commitment is that every qualified person will be evaluated according to their skills regardless of age, gender identity, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability status, or religion. Please refrain from including your picture and age with your application.&nbsp;</p> <p>&nbsp;</p> <p>#LI-Hybrid</p> <h3>&nbsp;</h3>