Why this role exists
We run high-volume document pipelines for enterprises in energy, logistics, and procurement. In those environments a missed batch isn’t an inconvenience; it’s a billing cycle or a compliance deadline.
As those commitments grow, reliability stops being something the founding team holds in its head and becomes a function with a single, named owner. You are that owner: the first dedicated hire whose mandate is that the platform stays up, stays fast, and stays correct under load. You’ll start as an individual contributor with real autonomy, and build the reliability function the company grows into.
The charter
Define reliability
SLOs, SLIs, and an error budget the whole team deploys against. Turn “99.9%” from an aspiration into an instrument with a published policy.
See everything
Observability, alerting, and on-call that catch problems before a customer does, and make the system legible to everyone who builds on it.
Run incidents like an engineer, not a fire-fighter
Lead response under pressure, then run blameless post-mortems that change the architecture, not just the runbook.
Make deploys boring
Safe rollouts, fast rollback, a release pipeline nobody has to think about. Friday afternoons included.
Scale the throughput
Capacity planning and performance for high-volume ingestion and the API surface customers build on, engineered to stay flat as volume climbs.
Hold the line where reliability meets compliance
Work alongside our security and data-protection posture (GDPR, ISO 27001 / 42001, HIPAA where it applies) so uptime and auditability move together.
What good looks like
Reliability, mapped
SLIs defined, current uptime measured honestly, the top failure modes named and ranked.
The budget is live
An error budget published and adopted. On-call and incident response exist and have been exercised for real. Deploy safety has a floor.
A function, not a heroics streak
99.9% is instrumented and trending. The reliability function has a shape other engineers can grow into.
The profile
- You’ve owned productionYou’ve been on the hook for a real system real users depended on. You’ve been paged at 3am and made the right call. This is scar tissue, not a certification.
- You’re calm when it’s on fireLow ego, clear head, decisive under a Sev1. We screen hardest for this, because it’s the trait that can’t be taught.
- You’re disciplined and diligentPost-mortem rigour, honest error budgets, no cowboy deploys. Reliability is the craft of doing the unglamorous thing every single time.
- You build agenticallyYou don’t tolerate AI-native engineering; you reach for it first. Our engineers ship with Claude Code. If that excites you rather than threatens you, we should talk.
- You’re ambitious about the boring stuffYour ambition points at making reliability a moat, the thing customers trust us for, rather than chasing the next greenfield. Mission over status.
The operating model
Small team, high trust, context over control. Real ownership from week one, and a weekly heartbeat everyone ships to.
Claude Code is how we ship, not an experiment. We build agentically by default, and we expect the reliability of an agentic codebase to be designed in, not bolted on.
We help write the rules of this category
- We co-authored DIN SPEC 91491, the German standard for AI-based document data extraction, with Fraunhofer IIS, Humboldt-Innovation and DIN e.V. We don’t follow this category’s rules; we help define them.
- NVIDIA Inception member, with roots in research affiliated with Humboldt University of Berlin, and backed by leading European deep-tech investors.
- Enterprise traction, at the inflection point where the platform underneath the promise has to be genuinely unbreakable. That’s the seat you’d be taking.
What we offer
- LocationBerlin, hybrid. CET ±2 for on-call coverage.
- CompensationSenior base of €80,000–€90,000, plus meaningful VSOP equity that reflects how early you’d be joining the team.
- ScopeThe reliability charter for a company whose entire promise is permanence: yours to define, instrument, and grow.
The process
- Intro with the founders. Meet the CEO and CTO: the mission, the seat, your questions. Bring a real Sev1 you’ve owned and walk us through it: the first ten minutes, the post-mortem, and what changed structurally afterwards.
- Paid co-working session. Spend a paid day building alongside the team on a real problem from our roadmap, with our stack and the way we actually work.
- Culture-fit meeting with the team. Meet the people you’d build with. Mutual fit, no trick questions.
- References. Including the ones you didn’t put on the list.