For its Sovereign Cloud Stack (SCS) project funded by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi), the Open Source Business Alliance - Bundesverband für digitale Souveränität e.V. (OSB Alliance) is looking for a

SCS Product Owner Container Technologies (d/f/m)

(Remote or Berlin city centre)

We aim to fill this position as soon as possible.

The OSB Alliance - Bundesverband für digitale Souveränität e.V. represents over 170 member companies in the Open Source economy, which together generate more than 1.7 billion € annually in Germany. Together with scientific institutions and user organisations, the association works to anchor the central importance of open source software and open standards for a digitally sovereign society in public awareness. The OSB Alliance sees open source and open standards as a compelling basis for digital sovereignty, flexibility and security in the digital transformation and thus as the answer to one of the greatest challenges of our time.

With the Sovereign Cloud Stack (SCS) project, the OSB Alliance is contributing to the realisation of the goals of the German government’s Digital Strategy 2025 and the European Gaia-X project by developing a next-generation open cloud infrastructure.

The project is driven by a small team in the OSB Alliance with multi-year funding from the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWi). The advertised position is part of this central team. In addition to this team, there are numerous developers from different companies and institutions in Europe who contribute to the project - some of them are funded by the project, others because their employers are interested in making this project successful.

The SCS project aims to define and implement a complete, modular, secure, open-source software stack. It covers software-defined storage and networking, operations tooling for automated deployment, logging, monitoring, alerting, trending, identity and authorisation management, an Infrastructure-as-a-Service layer, as well as a Container(Platform)-as-a-Service layer. It allows users (development teams) to create and control their own kubernetes cluster through standardised APIs and delivers standard building blocks that can be used to construct and manage container applications. This stack fulfills high security standards and comes with tooling and documentation that reduce the need for specialised expertise to run complex cloud and container infrastructures. SCS can be used by both cloud service providers and internal IT teams and can be deployed as a whole or by just cherry-picking needed components from it. The resulting infrastructure can be subjected to a certification process that ensures strict compatibility with other SCS-based platforms, thus building a network of federatable, compatible clouds.

The SCS project contributes to the European Gaia-X effort by serving as a reference for development work and enhancing it with an implementation that node-providers can leverage as a whole or in parts to deliver federated sovereign infrastructure, underpinning a sovereign data ecosystem.

In this role, you will

• be part of a small central (remotely working) team that orchestrates the efforts to define, implement and validate (CI/CD) a stack of open source software
• orchestrate a cross-cultural and cross-company team of engineers that contribute to the effort
• have the role to work with stakeholders to understand the requirements, see how they can fit together in a coherent technical architecture and collect and prioritize the backlog
• ensure that the needed research is performed to be able to take the right architectural decisions and document them
• work with the developers in the development team as product owner, defining the user stories and acceptance criteria together and ultimately be responsible to drive the implementation efforts to completion.
• ensure that the work results in software with all automation, configuration and tests for continuous automated deployment and testing
• work with the relevant open source communities, typically part of the CNCF

We expect that you

• have hands-on experience with Kubernetes and Kubernetes Cluster Management API, as well as standard tools in the Kubernetes world to integrate with the infrastructure and to manage deployments
• are experienced not just using such environments, but being in a responsible position to plan, deploy and operate them
• have been exposed to OpenStack and are familiar with setting up Kubernetes on top of OpenStack IaaS
• have been in leadership roles in engineering organizations
• are connected to the relevant open source communities
• are used to work in the open, exposing your work in progress to a broad community, accepting criticism and willing to work on defining and refining the chosen approach in interaction with the community, building (lazy) consensus
• are familiar with open source development tools and platforms such as Git, GitHub and the related workflows
• are experienced in using deployment automation and configuration management tooling such as Helm, Ansible, Terraform
• have experience in using agile development methodologies
• are willing and able to present complex technology on stage or in meetings

We offer

• working in an open and inspiring environment, interacting with highly-skilled and driven individuals from the project, the partners and the relevant open-source communities
• contributing to a project that will make a difference by being instrumental for a vivid ecosystem of federated infrastructure providers in Europe and beyond
• being a key part of a new project
• working on cutting-edge open source infrastructure technology
• a lot of flexibility in how you organise your work and contribute to the internationally distributed team. This is a full time position; we try to be flexible with part-time needs.
• getting visibility by presenting the project to stakeholders and to the public on technology conferences
• an adequate compensation package

Get in touch with Kurt Garloff, Dirk Loßack or Manuela Urban via jobs[minus]scs[at]osb[minus]alliance[dot]com if you are interested and would like to know further details. We are looking forward to receive applications with application letter, CV and other relevant material from you!