Job
- Level
- Senior
- Job Field
- IT, DevOps, Back End
- Employment Type
- Full Time
- Contract Type
- Permanent employment
- Location
- Berlin
- Working Model
- Onsite
Job Summary
In this role, you tackle complex backend issues, optimize infrastructure, enhance database performance, and work on high-risk migrations to improve system reliability and efficiency.
Job Technologies
Your role in the team
- Hey, I'm Niklas, co-founder and lead of our Platform Engineering team at Kombo! I'm looking for an excellent backend engineer with high agency who gets excited about the hardest technical parts of scaling a product: performance bottlenecks, risky migrations, reliability, infrastructure, and the tooling that helps engineers operate all of it safely.
- We are building the infrastructure platform that HR tech products are built on, from emerging category leaders like Juicebox to established players like Indeed.com.
- Concretely, we've built a unified API, a massive data synchronization engine, an observability platform, and an embedded integration setup/configuration UI.
- We offer this to other software companies so that they can provide prebuilt integrations with HR, ATS, LMS, and Payroll systems to their customers, instead of building and maintaining hundreds of integrations themselves.
- Most Engineering teams at Kombo are organized around the different product verticals we serve.
- The Platform team exists as a "horizontal" team that serves the needs of our Engineering org across the board.
- We work on shared technical problems whose impact cuts across our Product Engineering teams: scaling our infrastructure, finding and fixing bottlenecks in our application and databases, improving our CI and development workflows, and evolving how we handle on-call and incident response.
- We are looking for an excellent backend engineer who wants to work on the parts of our system where application code meets infrastructure: scalability bottlenecks, database performance, reliability, high-risk migrations, developer tooling, and production incidents.
- You will work across both backend code and infrastructure.
- While we're currently the ones holding "god mode" access to our infrastructure and handling on-call for P1/P2 alerts, part of our work for the coming 1-2 years will be empowering the individual Product Engineering teams to own and operate more of their own infrastructure - making sure we can scale our Engineering org without us becoming the bottleneck.
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Our expectations of you
Qualifications
- First and foremost, we are looking for an excellent backend engineer.
- You do not need to arrive as an expert in every part of our infrastructure, but you should have strong software engineering fundamentals and be genuinely excited to work closer to infrastructure, reliability, and developer tooling.
- A methodical approach to debugging complex problems and finding their actual root cause.
- The diligence to make high-risk changes safely, including thinking through failure modes, observability, rollout, and rollback.
- The ability to own ambiguous technical problems and communicate clearly without needing close management.
- Neugier und die Fähigkeit, sich schnell in unbekannte Teile eines Systems einzuarbeiten.
- Postgres performance work, including query analysis, indexing, or data-model design.
- Profiling, benchmarking, tracing, or debugging production systems.
- Ownership of large-scale or high-risk migrations.
- Helpful, but not required: Kubernetes, GCP, and Terraform, CI/CD systems and local development environments, Observability and incident response, Security or compliance work, Low-level networking or operating-system knowledge.
Experience
- Strong backend engineering fundamentals and experience building production services, APIs, and database-backed systems.
- Deep experience with TypeScript and Node.js.
- Experience with distributed systems, internal tooling, or shared backend infrastructure.
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What we offer
- This is a Berlin-based on-site role.
- We are building the backbone of our customers' products.
- Hundreds of companies architect around our API.
- That means if we design the wrong product or go down, hundreds of customers will have a major issue.
- We are very considerate about balancing where we can move fast because of cheap and reversible decisions vs. where we need to be extra diligent because of expensive one-way doors.
- We are building an API product, therefore we need to avoid breaking changes early.
- We put high emphasis on focusing on the most important thing and doing that very well.
- That comes at the tradeoff of sometimes moving slower on projects to do them well, delaying promises with customers, or letting many small fires burn in order to get the most important thing done.
- We always try to uncover what customers actually need, not what they ask for.
- We take high ownership of actually solving the problem for our customer, not just shipping a feature to spec.
- If you launch a feature and see that it's not solving the problem yet, it's your obligation to bring that up and improve the feature.
- We are living a culture of caring candidly at Kombo.
- Being honest and direct about the feedback you give and receive, while actually caring about the success of others and your surroundings.
- It's everyone's obligation to disagree with managers and peers when you see an issue.
- If you like first-principles thinking, you will feel at home at Kombo.
- We intentionally keep all processes lean so that engineers are as little constrained by others as possible.
- Hochwertige Arbeit wird sehr geschätzt und bevorzugt gegenüber Abkürzungen.
- The calendar of an engineer shouldn't be filled with meetings.
- Most engineers only have a daily 5-minute stand-up, right before lunch, and 1-2 meetings with customers or to unblock their projects per week.
- Mornings at Kombo are meeting-free focus time.
- We have a strong culture of documenting information and making knowledge accessible to the team.
- We write design docs and RFCs, every meeting gets recorded and the transcript is shared.
- That allows you to find the reasons behind almost all decisions.
- Many new joiners said they were surprised by how much we avoid BS.
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Topics You Will Work On
Job Locations
About Your Employer
Kombo
Kombo Technologies GmbH is an innovative startup based in Berlin that develops a unified API and infrastructure platform for HR tech integrations. The company specializes in simplifying complex system connections for B2B software products in the HR and workforce software sector. Since its founding in 2022, Kombo has been providing solutions that help software providers efficiently integrate their HR, payroll, and recruiting systems.
Description
- Company Type
- Startup
- Working Model
- Onsite
- Industry
- Internet, IT, Telecommunication
Senior Backend Engineer
- Location
- Berlin
- Working Model
- Onsite
- Diversity
- Open for all genders
- English Only
- English only required
