Site Reliability Engineer (f/m/x)

Location: Hybrid – Cologne (Rheinauhafen) — 3 days in the office, 2 remote (Tue + Thu)
Team: Engineering · Reports to CTO

Keep the world awake — build reliability at scale

ilert helps thousands of DevOps & IT teams detect, fix, and communicate incidents faster.

Our platform is mission-critical: customers rely on us 24/7 to keep their always-on businesses running.

As a Site Reliability Engineer at ilert, you’ll own the reliability, performance, and scalability of our core platform across AWS, Kubernetes, Kafka, and more.

Tasks

Build & operate a highly available platform

• Run and evolve our AWS-based infrastructure
• Operate and optimize self-managed Kafka, ClickHouse clusters and our Observability stack
• Ensure resilience, disaster recovery, and capacity planning across the stack

Improve reliability & performance

• Build and maintain SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, and observability dashboards
• Debug production issues across layers (networking, Kubernetes, application, DB)
• Improve performance of our ingestion pipeline

Automation & tooling

• Automate operations with Terraform, Helm, Kubernetes operators, and internal tooling
• Build tooling for safer deploys, blue/green rollouts, and automated verification
• Strengthen incident response workflows through deep collaboration with our AI SRE agent team

Security & compliance

• Implement best practices for workload isolation, secrets management, IAM, and auditability
• Support our ISO27001 posture by automating controls and hardening our infrastructure

Cross-functional impact

• Partner with Backend, AI, and Product teams to design reliable services
• Participate in on-call rotation
• Lead post-incident reviews and drive reliability improvements long-term

Requirements

• 3+ years experience as SRE, Platform Engineer, DevOps Engineer, or Infrastructure Engineer
• Strong hands-on experience with AWS, Kubernetes, Linux internals, networking, performance tuning
• Experience operating self-managed distributed systems, ideally Kafka or ClickHouse
• Strong understanding of observability
• Experience automating infrastructure with Terraform and CI/CD systems
• Fluent English (our working language); German optional

Benefits

• 🚀 Product-centric - 100 % focused on solving a mission-critical pain felt by every always-on business |
• Hybrid freedom - 2 days remote by default; gorgeous Rheinauhafen roof terrace when you’re in town |
• Focus > meetings - We time-box syncs, favour async docs and protect maker time |
• 28 days off - …plus public holidays |
• Commute perks - subsidised public transport|