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Open role · Platform · REQ PLATFORM-001

Senior Platform Engineer

Own the number that turns “query forever” from a promise into a guarantee.

Berlin · HybridFull-timeSenior ICReliability & Scale

Talonic captures an enterprise document once into a canonical field registry, then projects it to any schema, with no re-extraction, ever. Ingest once, query forever is a promise about permanence. Permanence has an uptime number. We’re hiring the engineer who owns it.

RELIABILITY TARGET99.9% UPTIME
SERVICE · 99.9%ERROR BUDGET · 0.1% ≈ 43 min / month

That sliver is the job. Defending it, and knowing when not to overspend on it, is the craft.

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The mandate

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.

What you’ll own

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.

First 180 days

What good looks like

DAY 30

Reliability, mapped

SLIs defined, current uptime measured honestly, the top failure modes named and ranked.

DAY 90

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.

DAY 180

A function, not a heroics streak

99.9% is instrumented and trending. The reliability function has a shape other engineers can grow into.

Who you are

The profile

// Non-negotiable
  • 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.
// What sets you apart
  • 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.
How we build

The operating model

Small team, high trust, context over control. Real ownership from week one, and a weekly heartbeat everyone ships to.

Monday
Business requirements set
Thursday
Delivery
Friday
Demo day

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.

Why Talonic

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.
The package

What we offer

  • Location
    Berlin, hybrid. CET ±2 for on-call coverage.
  • Compensation
    Senior base of €80,000–€90,000, plus meaningful VSOP equity that reflects how early you’d be joining the team.
  • Scope
    The reliability charter for a company whose entire promise is permanence: yours to define, instrument, and grow.
How we’ll meet

The process

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. Culture-fit meeting with the team. Meet the people you’d build with. Mutual fit, no trick questions.
  4. References. Including the ones you didn’t put on the list.
Apply

If permanence is a promise, you’re the one who keeps it up.

Send a note, and anything that shows how you think about reliability, to info@talonic.ai.

Apply for this role

We hire for the singular strength and build the team around it. If you don’t tick every box but you own the three non-negotiables, write to us anyway. Talonic is an equal-opportunity employer; we build a team as rigorous and varied as the problems we take on.