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|