KLM - Cloud & DevOps Coach | IaC Specialist

Overview

Join a multicultural Database Competence Center (35–40 people across NL/FR) modernizing from traditional database ops to Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) and DevOps. As a hands-on coach, you’ll guide engineers through mindset and ways-of-working changes—standardizing Terraform, GitHub Actions, and Ansible—across Linux-based environments (on-prem and Azure/GCP). This is ~80% coaching/training, 20% technical enablement. You won’t own Jira tickets or daily ops; you’ll enable those who do.

What you’ll do

• Coach/mentor engineers to adopt DevOps and IaC best practices at team and individual level.

• Design and deliver structured trainings/workshops; measure learning effectiveness and follow up.

• Establish and evangelize standards for Terraform, GitHub Actions, and Ansible.

• Guide platform operations across Azure and GCP (cloud-agnostic mindset).

• Foster collaboration between on-prem and cloud teams; reduce silos and handoffs.

• Advise the manager and product manager on team maturity, learning progress, and next steps.

• Travel occasionally to Toulouse & Paris to support local teams and harmonize practices.

• Contribute light hands-on enablement (code reviews, example repos, reference modules) ~20% of time.

Must-haves

• 5+ years guiding teams through DevOps/IaC transformations (coach/trainer/change agent).

• Proven didactic skills: curriculum building, facilitation, feedback loops, mentoring frameworks.

• Strong practical knowledge of Terraform, GitHub Actions, Ansible.

• Solid Linux fundamentals and experience with hybrid cloud (on-prem + Azure/GCP).

• Excellent communicator in English; comfortable in multicultural, distributed settings.

Nice-to-haves

• Exposure to database platforms/services (e.g., Redis, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle Exadata, Cosmos DB, Cloud SQL).

• Experience setting platform guardrails (modules, policies, golden paths, templates).

• Change management tooling/practices (OKRs for learning, maturity models, communities of practice).

• Basic cost awareness/FinOps and security-by-default patterns (secrets, least privilege).

Why this role

• Drive real mindset change at scale—your impact shows in how the org builds and operates.

• Shape standards and enablement (reference modules, pipelines, runbooks) used across countries.

• Work with modern stacks on Azure/GCP while staying cloud-agnostic in approach.

• High trust, low bureaucracy: focus on coaching outcomes, not ticket ownership.

Team & ways of working

• ~35–40 people across Amsterdam, Toulouse, Paris (≈12 NL colleagues).

• Hybrid: 2–3 days/week onsite in Amsterdam PoV; occasional travel to FR sites.

• Close partnership with manager (Harald Vos) and product manager for transformation roadmap.

Other notes:

• Mission: Move DB operations from artisanal/server-centric to IaC + CI/CD with strong coaching.

• Scope clarity: No BI/data warehousing ownership—transactional DB platforms on Linux (on-prem + Azure/GCP).

• Success profile: True coach/facilitator over “hero engineer”; measures learning outcomes, not ticket closure.

• Time split: ~80% coaching/training, ~20% technical enablement (e.g., example Terraform modules, reusable GH Actions workflows, Ansible roles).

• Tooling focus: Standardize Terraform modules, GitHub Actions reusable workflows, Ansible inventories/roles; push GitOps behaviors.

• Cultural needs: Empathy, patience, and didactic rigor; experience in multicultural orgs; can bridge on-prem and cloud teams.

• Nice extras for shortlisting: Prior platform enablement roles, internal academy building, maturity assessments, CoP leadership, and hands-on with Redis/MySQL.

• Travel: Light but required for alignment in Toulouse/Paris.

• Risk flags: Candidates who want to “own delivery/tickets” or default to hands-on ops rather than enablement.