Senior Site Reliability Engineer (Database)

📍 Berlin (On-site) · Full-time

Join Kombo as one of our first Database Reliability Engineer. You’ll take ownership of our Postgres infrastructure, ensuring performance, scalability, and reliability as we grow.
High impact, high autonomy, and the chance to shape Kombo’s database reliability practices from the ground up 🚀

• Greenfield impact: You’ll shape how database reliability and performance are done at Kombo — early enough to have a lasting architectural impact.

• Massive leverage: Kombo powers integrations for 100+ HR systems. Every millisecond saved and every outage prevented multiplies across all our customers.

• Career-defining: Build and scale the data layer at one of Europe’s fastest-growing API startups.

One API → 100+ HR, payroll & recruiting systems.
Teams integrate once with Kombo and ship in days, not months.

Since going through Y Combinator (S22), we’ve:

• Grown from zero to $8M ARR and hundreds of customers

• Scaled to process data for 10% of Germany’s workforce

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

• Grown to a 45+ person team 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 Site Reliability Engineer (Database) to lead how we scale, operate, and optimize Kombo’s Postgres environments.
You’ll work closely with our platform team, product engineers, and CTO to evolve our database architecture — balancing performance, scalability, and developer experience.

This is a hands-on role for someone who loves digging into performance metrics, understanding query plans, and making distributed systems fast and reliable.

• Own & evolve Postgres infrastructure: design, optimize, and maintain databases handling terabytes of data.

• Performance & tuning: manage indexing, vacuuming, partitioning, and connection pooling (e.g. PgBouncer).

• Scalability: plan and execute replication, sharding, and read replica strategies.

• Observability: instrument monitoring, alerting, and metrics for database performance and reliability (e.g. query latency, I/O, locks).

• Incident response: lead database-related incidents, drive root cause analysis, and define preventive measures.

• Reliability automation: use Terraform and scripting (Python, Go, or SQL) to automate database provisioning, backups, and maintenance.

• Collaboration: partner with the platform and backend teams to build systems that are fast, observable, and fault-tolerant.

• Operational excellence: define SLIs/SLOs/error budgets for data reliability, and ensure we can sleep soundly at night 😴

• 6–8+ years in database reliability, infrastructure, or backend engineering roles.

• Deep expertise with Postgres internals, performance tuning, and optimization at scale (terabyte+ datasets).

• Strong understanding of replication, failover, and disaster recovery strategies.

• Familiarity with Kubernetes and GCP environments (or equivalent cloud infra).

• Proficiency with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform) and automation.

• Solid troubleshooting experience across performance, scaling, and reliability incidents.

• Hands-on coding skills in SQL and one modern programming language (Python, Go, or TypeScript).

• Collaborative, pragmatic, and calm under pressure — low ego, high ownership.

• Experience with database sharding and multi-tenant architectures.

• Knowledge of data observability tools (e.g. pg_stat_statements, Prometheus, Grafana).

• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and schema migration tooling.

• Experience mentoring engineers or contributing to database best practices.

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

• Shape how we scale one of the fastest-growing data infrastructures.

• Freedom to experiment with new database technologies and monitoring approaches.

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

At Kombo, we move fast without compromising long-term quality. Our engineering culture is built around a few clear principles that guide how we design, ship, and maintain software:

We optimize for sustainable speed. That means making thoughtful trade-offs between shipping quickly today and protecting future velocity. We invest in strong fundamentals like testing, observability, sound API design, and security, and we treat AI as an accelerator, not a replacement for good engineering judgment.

Engineers at Kombo own their work from idea to production and beyond. A feature isn’t “done” when the PR is merged, it’s done when it runs reliably in production, delivers customer value, and is maintained over time. This includes rollout, monitoring, iteration, and follow-ups when things break.

We believe good decisions scale when they’re written down. We document context, trade-offs, and intent in PRs, Notion docs, and code comments so others can understand not just what changed, but why. This helps us avoid hidden technical debt and move faster as a team.

If you enjoy high ownership, clear standards, and building systems that last — you’ll feel at home at Kombo.

Overall, if joining an “SF company in Berlin” sounds appealing to you, then you should apply - even if you don't match all criteria 🙂