SRE Lead

Upvest is on a mission to make investing as easy as spending money. The company empowers businesses to offer a wide range of investment products and the best experience in the field of capital market investment and retirement planning. Upvest's Investment API is easy to integrate so that fintechs and enterprises alike can save resources and fully focus on their core business.‍

Upvest is one of the few fintechs in Europe that can provide its B2B clients with the full range of investment opportunities in the areas of principal broking business, proprietary trading, and safe custody business for traditional securities. The company was founded in 2017 by Martin Kassing and currently employs more than 200 people across Europe. Its latest €100m fundraising round (Series C) was led by Hedosophia and Sapphire Venture, with continued support from existing investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, BlackRock, Earlybird, HV Capital, Motive Ventures, and Notion Capital.

We currently employ 240+ people across Europe with our headquarters based in Berlin, Germany, and hubs in Tallinn, Estonia, and London, UK. We would consider hiring a hybrid setup with regular travels to Berlin for this role.

Reliability isn't just a metric for us. It's the foundation of everything we build. As Upvest scales at breakneck speed, we're raising the bar: establishing a dedicated SRE function to ensure our best-in-class reliability standards evolve as ambitiously as our platform. This is your chance to define what world-class reliability looks like for a market-leading, high-growth fintech platform.

You won't inherit legacy processes or fight bureaucracy. You'll architect the reliability culture, standards, and practices that will carry us through the next phase of rapid growth. If you've ever wanted to build an SRE practice the right way this is that moment.

Forget firefighting. You're here to prevent the fires from ever starting.

As SRE Lead, you'll be part technical visionary, part organizational catalyst. You'll embed reliability into the DNA of how we build, partner with engineering teams to shift left on observability and resilience, and create the frameworks that let us move fast and stay stable. Your team won't own services, you'll elevate everyone who does.

This is influence at scale. You'll shape how engineering leaders think about reliability, how product managers balance features against stability, and how our entire organization defines "production-ready." You'll build and mentor a lean, exceptional team of 2-4 SREs who will become force multipliers across the company.

What you'll build:

• Reliability as Code: establish SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets that become the shared language of engineering velocity and stability

• Proactive Defense: design chaos experiments, redundancy patterns, and failover strategies that validate resilience before customers ever see an issue

• Incident Excellence: transform how we respond to and learn from incidents, turning chaos into confidence through world-class runbooks and post-mortem culture

• Performance Engineering: drive load testing, benchmarking, and architecture reviews that ensure we can handle 10x our current scale

• Automation Leverage: eliminate toil ruthlessly. Build tools that let engineers focus on value, not repetitive operational drudgery

• Defensive Architecture: define the principles and patterns (circuit breakers, bulkheading, graceful degradation, intelligent rate limiting) that make our services antifragile

• Stress at Scale: validate system behavior under synthetic load and adversarial conditions, proving our defenses work before attackers or traffic spikes test them

You're not just experienced, you're battle-tested. You've been on-call when things broke spectacularly. You've rebuilt systems that couldn't scale. You've turned "hope it works" into "we know it works." And now you want to prevent the next generation of engineers from repeating those lessons the hard way.

You bring:

• Deep SRE Mastery: years in high-stakes environments (FinTech, payments, banking, trading, mission-critical SaaS) where downtime has real consequences

• Technical Depth: hands-on expertise with SLOs, chaos engineering, observability, automation, and the discipline of eliminating toil

• Systems Thinking: you understand resilience architecture deeply. You design systems that fail gracefully, not engineers who scramble desperately

• Influence Without Authority: exceptional communication and stakeholder management skills. You can change minds and shape culture through clarity, not mandates

• Leadership DNA: proven ability to hire A-players, mentor engineers, and guide career growth while setting technical direction

Bonus points:

• Investment Industry Fluency: understanding our domain means your SRE decisions align with business reality, not just technical ideals

• Stack Familiarity: experience with Golang, Kubernetes, GCP, Postgres, Kafka, or Datadog accelerates your impact

Reliability is our competitive advantage. When financial institutions trust us with their infrastructure, they're trusting our uptime, our resilience, our ability to handle anything the market throws at us. You'll ensure that trust is not just earned, but engineered.

This isn't a role for incrementalists. If you want to copy-paste an SRE playbook from your last company, this isn't for you. But if you want to define what exceptional looks like, build a team that sets the bar for an entire industry, and create leverage that compounds across every engineering team we have - let's talk.

Build the reliability others wish they had.

Why Upvest?

• We're working on solving a hard problem: Fixing the European securities financial infrastructure that empowers more people to be able to invest. You have the opportunity to contribute to this change.

• We invest in you: From access to a personal coach, development budget, and plenty of opportunities to grow in your role.

• We live a culture of empowerment: We trust that we hire the best people and get out of their way. We value openness—there's a greater advantage in sharing information than keeping it to ourselves.

• Flexible work environment: While we're not quite fully remote, we are committed to being a flexible employer, as we understand you don't have to be in the office to do your best work.

• Make it easy for others. We simplify the complex and act with the best intentions

• Own the outcome. We are proactive, fast and confident to get the job done, valuing progress over perfection.

• Rise to the challenge. We aim high and push the boundaries. We stay curious, learn and celebrate our wins together.

• Tell the story. We start with the Why to align on purpose. We are transparent and share knowledge to empower and inspire others.

Upvest is an equal opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.