Summary
Join an ambitious technology team as its first dedicated reliability engineer. You will own platform availability and performance, define SLOs and error budgets, establish observability and alerting, lead incident response and blameless post-mortems, and make deployments safer through effective rollback practices. The role offers significant autonomy and a path to build a broader reliability function as the organization scales.
Highlights
Founding reliability role with substantial autonomy and ownership. Opportunity to define reliability standards, establish observability and incident-management practices, and build the future reliability function while remaining hands-on.
Description
We're hiring: Staff Site Reliability Engineer (Founding) — Berlin (Hybrid)At Talonic, our promise is simple: ingest once, query forever.
We capture an enterprise document once into a canonical field registry, then project it to any schema — no re-extraction, ever.
But permanence has an uptime number.
We're hiring the first dedicated reliability engineer who owns it.
The mandateYou'll be our founding reliability hire, the named owner who keeps the platform up, fast, and correct under load.
Start as an IC with real autonomy, then build the reliability function the company grows into.
The target is 99.9% uptime (an error budget of ~43 min/month).
Defending that sliver, and knowing when not to overspend on it - is the task.
What you'll ownDefine reliability - SLOs, SLIs, and a published error-budget policyObservability, alerting, and on-call that catch problems before customers doIncident response + blameless post-mortems that change the architectureSafe, boring deploys - fast rollback, a pipeline nobody fears (Fridays included)Capacity planning for high-volume ingestion and our API surfaceReliability where it meets compliance (GDPR, ISO 27001 / 42001, HIPAA)Our stackWe run on AWS, ship in Docker, and deploy on Railway.
If you haven't used our exact tools, that's fine, we'll invest in onboarding you.
Tools are teachable; the reliability instinct isn't.
What matters is that you've owned production somewhere real, you're diligent, and you're excited about building with AI.
Who you areYou've owned production - been paged at 3am and made the right callYou're calm when it's on fire - low ego, decisive under a Sev1You're disciplined - post-mortem rigour, honest error budgets, no cowboy deploysYou build agentically - our engineers ship with Claude Code, and that excites you rather than threatens youWhy TalonicCo-authors of DIN SPEC 91491 (with Fraunhofer IIS, Humboldt-Innovation & DIN e.V.) - we help define this category's rulesNVIDIA Inception member, backed by leading European deep-tech investorsEnterprise traction at the inflection point where the platform has to be genuinely unbreakableThe processIntro 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.The packageBerlin, hybrid (CET ±2 for on-call)€80,000–€90,000 base + meaningful VSOP equityThe reliability charter — yours to define, instrument, and growIf you don't tick every box but you own the three non-negotiables, write to us anyway.
Talonic is an equal-opportunity employer.
📩 Apply: send a note + anything showing how you think about reliability to jobs@talonic.ai
