(Senior) Backend Engineer - SRE / Infrastructure (all genders)

We are looking for our first Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) in Berlin. You’ll work on reliability, scale our infrastructure, and help define how SRE is done at koppla - while staying hands-on. You’ll work side-by-side with our backend engineer and a team of smart, driven product engineers, taking ownership of AWS, Postgres, Kafka and CI/CD pipelines. While this role is SRE focussed, you will also get to also work on the backend and help build new features.

Compensation: €75k-100k + 25-35% equity.
Location: Berlin (Hybrid, 2+ days/week in office)

Activities

• Own & evolve infrastructure: Keep koppla’s systems highly available, scalable, and secure.
• Incident response: Lead on-call rotations, run blameless postmortems, and continuously improve our response processes.
• Systems: Design, operate, simplify (e.g. swap Kafka with SQS) and optimize services on AWS (S3, Dynamo, Aurora, ECS, IAM, Lambda,).
• Database reliability: Own Postgres administration (backups, performance tuning, index management) and ensure resilience at scale.
• Observability: Improve monitoring & alerting (AWS, Sentry and anything you recommend).
• Networking: Manage VPCs, routing, load balancing, and related components.
• CI/CD: Automate and streamline pipelines (GitHub Actions).
• Collaboration and DX: Work closely with our TypeScript-heavy product team to embed reliability and simplicity into every release in a truly cross-functional process.
• Features: Besides Infra related work, you will help bring in value for customers through backend feature development.

Stack: NodeJS, TypeScript, AWS, GraphQL (Apollo), PostgreSQL, Terraform, Kafka, Socket.io. You should be familiar with some of these or similar technologies.

Requirements

This role is perfect for a DevOps / SRE engineer with 4-6 years of experience looking to grow their skills and make a meaningful impact at a company that is approaching product-market fit (approaching €2M ARR). You are likely a great fit if:

• You optimize platform and processes with a dual focus on developer productivity and customer experience.
• You take a pragmatic approach, harmonizing infrastructure cleanliness with speed of execution.
• You have solid engineering fundamentals, write clean and efficient code, and are eager to continue improving your skills.
• You have a solid understanding of performance optimization, distributed architectures, and security for large-scale systems.
• You can provide a proven track record with incident management and production troubleshooting.
• You thrive in a fast-paced startup environment, enjoy taking ownership of your tasks, and stay proactive in solving challenges.

Application Process

1. Initial Interview (with People & Culture - Basic Culture Fit, Expectations, General Screening)
2. Coding Challenge with Coderbyte
3. Technical Interview
4. Founder Interview (Meet the Founders - Mindset, Strategy, Culture Fit)
5. Reference Call (we would like to speak to one of your Line Managers from one of the last positions and will ask for contact details)