Lead DevOps Engineer

About Crystalloids

At Crystalloids, we’ve been helping businesses grow and innovate since 2006. Our team of passionate software and data specialists is dedicated to building smart, data-driven solutions that make a real difference. As a Premier Google Cloud Partner, we use the latest technology to help our customers solve challenges and unlock new opportunities.

We believe that the foundation for a successful solution is based on three dimensions: the people, the processes and the technology. By keeping these in balance, we create solutions that are not just effective but built to last.

Over the years, we’ve worked with incredible clients in retail, e-commerce, media, and travel. Brands like Rituals, PVH, Swiss Sense, KNVB, Body & Fit, FD Mediagroep, and ACSI have trusted us to help them reach their goals. 

What will you do as a DevOps Lead Engineer

As a DevOps Lead Engineer, you will be the technical and operational leader of Crystalloids’ DevOps Engineering, Managed Services, and Internal Service Desk functions. You will oversee incident management, platform reliability, CI/CD delivery, security compliance (ISMS), and day-to-day service operations. While your engineering team handles most execution, you must be capable of stepping in to resolve escalations, make architectural decisions, and set technical direction.

Reporting directly to the Head of Development, you’ll work closely with security officers, data engineers & developers, solution architects, and external stakeholders to ensure robust, efficient, and secure operations across our cloud-native solutions.

Your mission is to build and lead a high-impact, enterprise-grade DevOps practice that brings together DevOps Engineering, Managed Services, and Service Desk operations. You will:

• Lead the shift from reactive support to proactive, scalable, and cost-efficient operations
• Champion automation-first thinking and standardise tooling across teams
• Enforce cloud security best practices and support ongoing ISMS compliance
• Foster a growth-oriented team culture rooted in technical excellence, accountability, and continuous improvement
• Guide the team through organisational and mindset transitions, adopting automation and AI-assisted tooling where it meaningfully improves delivery, observability, or operations.

You’ll elevate how we deliver, monitor, and secure our data solutions on Google Cloud Platform through strong leadership and hands-on capability.

Main responsibilities and tasks

Technical Leadership & Cloud Operations

• Own the security and reliability of cloud infrastructure across GCP environments.
• Monitor and maintain production health across key GCP services, including BigQuery, Firestore, Cloud Run, App Engine, Dataflow, Looker & Dataform, Cloud Composer, Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, Cloud SQL, Apigee, APIs, etc.
• Responsible for cloud resource hierarchy, IAM policies, and service account management across multi-project structures.
• Lead the introduction of GCP-native security practices (e.g., IAM, VPC SC, workload identity).
• Embed automation across environments to eliminate repetitive manual tasks and reduce human error. With the help of AI/ML capabilities
• Design and enforce standards and reusable patterns that reduce delivery complexity and improve team scalability.
• Introduce and operationalise Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform, embedding it as a standard practice within the team.
• Package repeatable infrastructure solutions (e.g., Terraform modules, CI/CD templates) into internal products to accelerate delivery and ensure consistency
• Provided hands-on technical support to DevOps Engineers and resolved escalated incidents.

CI/CD, Security & Compliance

• Design and manage secure, scalable CI/CD pipelines and release automation.
• Champion DevSecOps practices, including SLA’s, vulnerability scanning, secrets management, and policy enforcement.
• Ensure infrastructure and pipelines comply with ISMS requirements and support external audits.
• Collaborate with security officers on ISO 27001 controls and documentation.

Observability, Reliability & FinOps

• Embed SRE principles: SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, postmortems, and automated remediation.
• Drive cost optimisation using GCP Recommender, budget tracking, and committed-use planning.
• Automate monitoring of data pipelines for data quality, such as freshness, anomalies, and SLA tracking.
• Collaborate with data teams on instrumentation, alerting, and compliance for observability.

Team Leadership, Enablement & Delivery Oversight

• Mentor DevOps and Managed Services engineers with structured growth plans aligned with team objectives.
• Champion internal education through structured onboarding, peer-led learning, and technical enablement focused on DevOps maturity and automation.
• Drive a culture of engineering excellence.
• Promote a mindset of engineering efficiency: automate first, document second, never repeat manually.
• Translate high-level business goals into actionable roadmaps for the DevOps function.
• Communicate clearly with internal and external stakeholders about priorities and progress.
• Report to stakeholders on team health, delivery throughput, incident metrics, cost savings, and system uptime.
• Oversee Service Desk operations and ensure transparent issue tracking, escalation management, and resolution SLAs.
• Drive the adoption of a shift-left mindset for security, observability, and testing.
• Coordinate with sales and marketing teams to qualify for new opportunities and technical positioning.
• Translate DevOps services into compelling customer value propositions. Proactively participate in the sales process to gather client requirements and propose relevant services and products to customers.
• Define, guard, and evolve our contract offering (service catalogue, SLAs/SLOs, support tiers) so engagements are scoped, repeatable, and profitable.
• Own client-facing visibility of our work by: 
  • Establishing shared dashboards and reports, ensuring every customer has a clear, timely, and trustworthy status 
  • Implementing a unified metrics framework (SLIs/SLOs, OLAs, KPIs/OKRs) with live dashboards and a fixed review cadence to ensure consistent, trustworthy reporting.

Experience and qualifications

Must-Haves

• Master’s degree in Computer Science, Informatics, Software Engineering or related field.
• 6+ years in DevOps, SRE, or platform engineering roles, with at least 2 years in a technical leadership or team-enablement position
• Deep hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform, including services like Compute Engine, IAM, Cloud Run, Cloud Composer, GKE, BigQuery, Firestore, Cloud SQL, and Cloud Monitoring (or alternative Cloud providers)
• Strong skills in Infrastructure as Code (Terraform), scripting (Python, Bash), CI/CD tooling, and Git-based workflows
• Proven experience with incident response, platform troubleshooting, and managing complex infrastructure setups
• Demonstrated ability to lead teams through transition, from manual, reactive work to automation-first, scalable operations
• Automation and AI-aware mindset: familiar with automating operational workflows and open to integrating modern AI-assisted tooling (e.g., Gemini, GitHub Copilot, alert triage, or log summarisation tools)
• Solid grasp of cloud security and DevSecOps principles, including secret management, identity and access control, vulnerability scanning, and ISMS alignment
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills across both technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Fluent in English (Dutch is a plus), and currently residing in the Netherlands.
• Commercial Awareness/Selling Skills

Nice-to-Haves

• GCP Professional Certifications (DevOps Engineer, Cloud Architect, Security Engineer).
• Experience managing Jira Service Management or other internal service desk tools.
• Understanding of ISMS / ISO 27001 processes and documentation.
• Familiarity with data observability practices
• Familiarity with DevSecOps tooling like GCP Security Command Center or Wiz
• Knowledge of tools like Looker

What we offer

• Work in an international environment with a vibrant social support network
• Competitive salary with an interesting bonus and pension scheme
• Excellent work/life balance and up to 28 days of annual leave
• Work primarily from our vibrant Rotterdam office, with opportunities to visit clients' offices, fostering collaboration and engagement in dynamic professional environments
• A laptop and first-class travel arrangement by public transport
• Opportunities for personal and professional growth through various technical courses.

Interested? Apply below or email us your CV and cover letter to recruitment@crystalloids.com

WE ONLY ACCEPT APPLICATIONS FROM DEVELOPERS ALREADY RESIDING IN THE NETHERLANDS