Lead Engineer, Site Reliability

What if your work helped secure access for millions of researchers and students worldwide?

At GÉANT, we enable cutting-edge research and education across Europe and beyond. Our Trust & Identity (T&I) team delivers advanced IAM/AAI services to critical initiatives like the European Open Science Cloud, EuroHPC systems, and Erasmus.

As SRE Lead, you’ll combine technical excellence with leadership impact. You’ll guide a team of engineers while staying hands-on with the systems that keep Europe’s research and education connected. Your leadership will shape team growth, technical direction, and operational excellence, while your engineering skills ensure reliability, automation, and security at scale.

Your Impact:

• Lead and mentor: Drive team development, career growth, and knowledge sharing.
• Stay hands-on: Dedicate ~80% of your time to technical work, ensuring you remain close to the challenges your team faces.
• Keep Europe online: Guarantee 99.9%+ uptime for identity services used by millions.
• Design resilience: Build monitoring and observability that spots issues before they happen.
• Automate at scale: Replace manual tasks with smart automation and CI/CD pipelines.
• Champion security: Apply best practices and compliance to protect sensitive data.
• Push performance boundaries: Optimise systems for speed, scalability, and reliability.

About You

You’re an experienced technical leader who thrives on building reliable, automated systems at scale; and helping others do the same.

Key strengths:

• Proven experience leading technical teams in a matrix environment
• Advanced Linux administration and automation with Terraform/Ansible
• Strong AWS experience for high-availability systems
• Programming in Python and Go for automation and optimization
• Solid understanding of networking, security, and container orchestration
• Bonus points for: Kubernetes expertise, IAM protocols, and experience with service mesh or message queues

Working Arrangements

Hybrid working with at least 1 day/week in our Amsterdam office.

About Us

Why work for GÉANT?

GÉANT is at the heart of research and education networking, offering talented people the opportunity to be part of something meaningful and worthwhile. With 150 employees based in Amsterdam and Cambridge, we deliver an information ecosystem of infrastructure and services to advance research, education, and innovation on a global scale. Thanks to our terabit network, 50 million researchers, scientists, academics, and students can share record volumes of data unconstrained by location, solving some of humankind’s biggest challenges. Work at GÉANT and you’ll be supporting critical research into sustainable energy, deep space, high-energy physics, earth observation, environmental disasters, medicine, and much more!

Benefits of working for GÉANT

You’ll receive excellent benefits at GÉANT – we offer a generous holiday allowance and a 5% end of year bonus/allowance as standard. The other benefits you receive will depend on the country you are employed in, but you can rest assured that these will include an appropriate pension scheme and medical insurance.