Kafka Reliability Engineer – Jobs in Germany

Company Description

Wolt is a Helsinki-based technology company that provides an online platform for consumers, merchants and couriers. It connects people looking to order food and other goods with people interested in selling and delivering them. To enable this, Wolt develops a wide range of technologies from local logistics to retail software and financial solutions – as well as operating its own grocery stores under the Wolt Market brand. Wolt’s products include Wolt+ (subscription service for customers), Wolt for Work (meal benefits and office deliveries for companies), Wolt Drive (fast last-mile deliveries for merchants) and Wolt Self-Delivery (service for merchant partners with their own delivery staff). Wolt’s mission is to make cities better by empowering and growing local communities. Wolt was founded in 2014 and joined forces with DoorDash in 2022. DoorDash operates in 29 countries today, 25 of which are with the Wolt product and brand.

Working in Product Development at Wolt

At Wolt, we’re about getting things done. You’ll probably enjoy it here if you like taking ownership, developing yourself and being around friendly, humble and ambitious people. 

The behind the scenes of Wolt is run by an awesome bunch of over 700+ planners, builders, designers and data crunchers. We call ourselves Product+, as we’re the very core of Wolt’s products, tools and platforms. To build our products, we work in over 60  cross-functional, independent and autonomous teams. Teams are made up of a mix of talented individuals: engineers, designers, data scientists, analysts, and product leads. Each team takes ownership for solving customer problems in the best possible way.

Our Commitment to Diversity, Equity & Inclusion

We want to have all sorts of people in our team – people like you and me, and people different from you and me. To be able to work with diverse teammates – when it comes to gender, age, ethnicity, life background, sexual orientation, political views, religion, or any other personal trait – we consciously aim to offer equal opportunity for everyone to work with us. This is because we believe diverse teams make the most thought-through decisions and build things in the most inclusive way.

Join us today to build Wolt together.

#LI-AP7

Job Description

In this role, you will be part of Wolt’s Platform department (Core Group), ensuring Reliability best practices for the datastores used across Wolt. The Database Reliability Team is responsible for maintaining smooth datastore operations for 45M+ registered users and 170 000+ active venues. Our primary focus is on MongoDB, PostgreSQL, and Kafka, along with other storage technologies.

As part of the Database Reliability Team you will be responsible for:

• Defining and implementing guardrails to ensure best practices are followed across Wolt’s engineering organization

• Supporting teams in optimizing performance and resolving the most complex datastores-related issues

• Acting as an evangelist for datastores optimization and best practices within the organization

• Proactively analyzing the largest datastores, assisting teams with capacity planning, and proposing improvements for performance and availability

• Handling „keep the lights on“ tasks and automating repetitive processes to minimize operational toil

• Ensuring security best practices working in collaboration with Security and Compliance teams

• Driving the adoption of monitoring tools, dashboards, and alerts to improve observability and incident response

While team members may specialize in one of technologies (e.g., some focusing on RDS, others on Kafka), we encourage learning and support engineers in expanding their expertise across different data storage domains.

Our Ways Of Working

The Database Reliability Team follows an Agile workflow tailored to our needs:

• Quarterly planning: We set priorities together, aligning with company OKRs and our vision for reliability and essential maintenance tasks

• Minimal meetings: To keep engineers focused, we have bi-weekly planning & retrospectives, twice-weekly standups, and ad-hoc project discussions as needed

Qualifications

You’ll be a great fit for this role if you have the following skills and experience:

• Hands-on experience with Kafka and Kafka Connect

• Understanding of Kafka performance tuning, metrics, producer and consumer settings

• Knowledge of SRE best practices

• Experience working with one of the Cloud providers: AWS / Azure / GCP

• Strong communication and collaboration skills with the ability to write clear documentation for other engineers

• Experience with modern software development tools and methodologies, including IaC, monitoring, and observability tools

• Experience collaborating with SaaS vendors is a plus

• Knowledge of one of the JVM languages Java / Kotlin / Scala  would be a plus

You don’t need to tick every box, but if you see yourself in many of these points, we’d love to hear from you!

Additional Information

At Wolt, we’re committed to building an environment where engineers can make an impact while enjoying meaningful challenges. As a member of the Databases Reliability Team you’ll enjoy:

• Working on solutions that support millions of users

• Solving complex problems in performance, relailbilty and automation

• A collaborative and inclusive culture that supports your professional and personal well-being

📍This open role can be based in all of our tech hubs in Helsinki or Berlin. This can vary depending on the exact team and their main location. You can choose whether you want to work from home, from the office or hybrid.

The position will be filled as soon as we find the right person, so make sure to apply as soon as you realize you really, really want to join us!

The compensation will be a negotiable combination of monthly pay and DoorDash RSUs. The latter makes it exceptionally easy to be excited about our company growing and doing well, as you’ll own a piece of the pie.