Principal DevOps Engineer (Germany)

As a Principal DevOps Engineer, you partner directly with Engineering leadership to set the technical direction and multi-year strategy for Oviva's infrastructure and platform, ensuring it is aligned to mid- and long-term business goals.
You will work within the Engineering function and work closely with senior engineering leaders, fellow Staff and Principal engineers, and the engineering teams who build and ship on the platform you own. You collaborate with Security & Compliance (Quality/QMS) on regulatory and security matters, and you own key external technology relationships, including cloud providers and infrastructure vendors.
As the most senior infrastructure authority, you are the ultimate technical arbitrator on cross-company decisions, ensuring scalability, reliability, and maintainability, as well as security and cloud architecture.

Essential:

• Industry-recognised mastery in designing, building, and operating large-scale, business-critical distributed systems and the platforms that run them.
• Deep expertise across infrastructure domains: container orchestration, cloud architecture, infrastructure-as-code, networking, observability, and continuous delivery.
• Strong reliability-engineering background: designing for high availability, leading incident response, and driving operational maturity.
• Security-first mindset with proven experience operating in a regulated environment (information-security and/or medical-device standards) and embedding compliance into platforms.
• Continuous delivery and DevOps mindset, with a track record of automating release processes and improving development workflows and release efficiency.
• Vendor and external-partner management — evaluating, selecting, and managing cloud and infrastructure providers, including cost and performance.
• Exceptional business acumen, with the ability to translate high- and business goals into a coherent and actionable technical strategy. Building systems that also be able to adapt to future business goals by anticipating potential changes
• Strong ability to communicate complex technical ideas clearly and influence executive, non-technical audiences.
• A proven history of visionary technical leadership with projects that had significant, long-term impact across a business.
• Master's in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience

Desirable:

• Driven by a strong curiosity in cutting-edge tech, you're hands-on, experimenting with new technology and how we could best leverage it
• Experience in presenting at external tech talks, external meetups, or conferences.
• Leadership roles in major open-source projects or industry standards bodies.
• Experience in a regulated industry, such as healthcare.

• Own and drive the long-term technical strategy and architectural vision for Oviva's infrastructure and platform.
• Act as technical owner and lead architect for our most critical systems: container platform, deployment/delivery pipeline, observability, and service identity.
• Be accountable for platform reliability and operational excellence: availability, incident response and prevention, and continuous improvement of how we run production.
• Own the platform's security and regulatory-compliance posture (e.g. medical-device and information-security standards), partnering with Quality and Security teams to make compliance an automated, built-in property of the platform.
• Own key external technology relationships and vendor management: cloud providers and infrastructure vendors; including technical evaluation, negotiation input, and ongoing performance and cost management.
• Drive infrastructure cost-efficiency, ensuring spend scales sustainably with the business.
• Build self-service capabilities, golden paths, and reusable frameworks so teams can build, deploy, and operate independently without the platform becoming a bottleneck.
• Provide direct, expert counsel to leadership on technology threats, opportunities, and strategic infrastructure investments.
• Mentor and develop Senior & Staff engineers, growing the next generation of technical leaders.
• Identify and mitigate technical and operational risk, ensuring the long-term health, reliability, and scalability of our systems.
• Champion engineering excellence: high standards in automation, testing, documentation, and operational practices and apply AI to improve developer productivity and operational efficiency.
• Lead one or more engineering guilds to set, align on, and govern standards (e.g. delivery, infrastructure, security, quality gates).