Senior Operations Engineer (Kubernetes & Instant Payments)

At Sytac, you work inside the critical platforms that power some of the Netherlands’ largest enterprise names. Real volume, real reliability requirements, real ownership. For this role, you step into one of Europe’s premier Tier-1 digital banking powerhouses, embedded in their core instant payments routing ecosystem. What makes this team compelling is the sheer operational gravity: you aren’t bogged down in legacy red tape—you operate high-throughput Kubernetes workloads with production write access, the autonomy to fix root causes rather than patch symptoms, and the technical responsibility of keeping millions of live euro transactions flowing seamlessly every single second. Why This Isn’t Your Typical "Ops" Role Forget logging tickets or sitting passively in war rooms. In this role, you sit at the heart of an ultra-high-throughput Instant Payments routing platform running on Kubernetes, where transaction latency is measured in milliseconds and downtime directly affects millions of real-time transfers. As a Tier-2 Production Operations Engineer, you hold production write access. When a routing anomaly fires or a network barrier trips, you are the person who dives into the cluster, isolates the failure, scripts the fix, and restores traffic. If you are a hands-on engineer who thrives at the intersection of container orchestration, network routing, and platform resilience under pressure, this is your arena. What You’ll Actually Do - Direct Tier-2 Incident Triage: Serve as the first technical escalation point when automated alerts trigger. You will dive into pods, query logs in Kibana/ELK, inspect Prometheus metrics, and use Bash/Python scripts to remediate live issues. - Network & Ingress/Egress Hygiene: Maintain total visibility over internal and external network connections. You will troubleshoot firewall boundaries, routing policies, and secure connections running between enterprise platforms and external payment networks. - Vulnerability & Code-Quality Ownership: Actively hunt for technical debt, code smells, and CVEs across running containers and third-party dependencies. You decide what to patch immediately, what to automate away, and what to escalate to security. - Blameless, Technical Post-Mortems: Run deep-dive RCAs to understand why failures happened at a systems level, translating operational fire drills into permanent automation, alerts, and preventative guardrails. - Standby Roster: Participate in a structured, balanced rotation (typically 3–4 night shifts and 7–10 day shifts per month) with dedicated backup. Who You Are - Instant Payments / High-Throughput Background: You understand how low-latency transaction routing works and appreciate the operational stakes of moving money in real time. - Hands-on Kubernetes Operator: You don’t just deploy YAMLs; you know how to inspect pod lifecycles, diagnose networking/service discovery issues, and navigate clusters via CLI during high-pressure scenarios. - Observability Native: You are fast and fluent with Prometheus metrics, dashboarding, and log querying in Kibana / ELK. - Solid Networking Foundation: Clear understanding of TCP/IP, firewalls, DNS, VPNs, reverse proxies, and traffic routing across secured network borders. - Pragmatic Automator: Strong Linux debugging skills and comfort writing Bash or Python scripts to automate repetitive operational tasks. - Team & Logistics Fit: Open to working via secondment/payroll (no ZZP/freelance) and collaborating in person in Amsterdam Mondays and Wednesdays. Life at Sytac Working at Sytac means joining a community that prioritizes your growth. Our benefits package is designed for flexibility, learning, and adventure: - Unlimited Growth Days: Enjoy your professional development and Sytac activities! 📚 - The Best Gear: Pick a private laptop (<€4,000) with 50% paid by us, plus a tech budget. 💻 - Invest in You: A €2,400 annual growth budget for training and conferences. 🌿 - Future Proof: We contribute 3.75% to your pension. - Legendary Trips: Join our annual ski trips, beach BBQs, and epic parties! ⛷️