Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) @Kombo

Berlin (On-site) · Full-time

TL;DR

Join Kombo as one of our first Senior SREs. You'll work on reliability, scale our infrastructure, and help define how SRE is done at Kombo — while staying hands-on. High impact, high autonomy, and the chance to shape (and later lead) our growing platform/SRE function.

Why You Should Join Now

• Greenfield impact: you'll shape our reliability culture and practices early, before things calcify.

• Massive leverage: our product is the integration layer for 100+ HR systems. Every improvement in reliability multiplies across all our customers.

• Career-defining: build the SRE function at a high-growth API startup. This is the type of opportunity that shapes both a company's future and your own

• Tight team, real ownership: 45+ people across Berlin & NYC, still lean enough that every decision you make is felt across the company.

About Kombo

One API → 100+ HR, payroll & recruiting systems.

Teams integrate once with Kombo and ship in days, not months.

Since going through Y Combinator in 2022, we:

• Grew from zero revenue to 7 millions in ARR and hundreds of customers at a pace that puts among the ~top-5% of VC-backed startups

• Scaled to process data for the equivalent of 10% of Germany's workforce

• Raised $8M+ of funding from Y Combinator, 468 Capital and other top-tier investors

• Grew to a team of 45+ Kombies working across Berlin and NYC

We're building the infrastructure layer for how companies connect to HR data — and reliability is everything.

The Role

We're looking for a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to help us scale Kombo's platform and shape how reliability is done here. You'll work side-by-side with our current SRE and a team of smart, driven product engineers, taking ownership of Kubernetes, GCP, Postgres, and CI/CD pipelines.

At Kombo, we are working hard to establish one of the leading engineering cultures: no BS, high ownership, close to customers and product, and a deep appreciation for the engineering craft (our founders are all engineers). We value simplicity, do things well, and stay on the edge of what's possible with AI. This is a hands-on role with autonomy, visibility, and the opportunity to influence both our technology and culture as we grow.

What You'll Do

• Own & evolve infrastructure: Keep Kombo's systems highly available, scalable, and secure.

• Incident response: Lead on-call rotations, run blameless postmortems, and continuously improve our response processes.

• Distributed systems: Design, operate, and optimize services on Kubernetes & Google Cloud.

• Database reliability: Own Postgres administration (backups, performance tuning, index management), handle terabyte-scale tables, and ensure resilience at scale.

• Observability: Improve monitoring & alerting (Google Cloud Monitoring + any tools you recommend).

• Networking: Manage VPCs, routing, load balancing, and related components.

• CI/CD: Automate and streamline pipelines (GitHub Actions).

• Collaboration: Work closely with our TypeScript-heavy product team to embed reliability into every release.

• Operational excellence: Define SLIs/SLOs/error budgets, write runbooks, and champion good engineering hygiene.

What You'll Bring

• 6–8+ years in SRE, DevOps, or infrastructure-focused software roles, ideally in growth-stage environments.

• Strong expertise in at least one of: compute, storage/databases, or networking in cloud environments.

• Core competency in Postgres database administration, including index management, query testing, and large-scale (terabyte+) table handling.

• Proficiency with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform).

• Proven track record with incident management and production troubleshooting.

• Solid understanding of performance optimization, distributed architectures, and security for large-scale systems.

• Hands-on coding skills in at least one modern programming language (e.g. TypeScript, Python, Go, Java, Ruby).

• Excellent communication skills and the ability to work cross-functionally.

• Calm, data-driven approach under pressure — with a low-ego, high-ownership mindset.

Nice to Have

• Database sharding, replication, or advanced scaling techniques.

• Experience mentoring engineers or leading small teams.

• Exposure to security/compliance frameworks (SOC2, ISO27001, GDPR).

• Background with other clouds (AWS/Azure) or additional database tech (NoSQL, Cassandra).

• PgBouncer expertise (connection pooling for Postgres).

Why Join Kombo

• Shape reliability at a high-growth startup — big impact, high visibility.

• Freedom to experiment with new tools and practices.

• Collaborative, pragmatic culture that values good engineering and curiosity.

• Competitive salary + meaningful equity.

---