Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)

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.

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.

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.