(Founding) Site Reliability Engineer

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 mandate

You'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 own

• Define reliability - SLOs, SLIs, and a published error-budget policy
• Observability, alerting, and on-call that catch problems before customers do
• Incident response + blameless post-mortems that change the architecture
• Safe, boring deploys - fast rollback, a pipeline nobody fears (Fridays included)
• Capacity planning for high-volume ingestion and our API surface
• Reliability where it meets compliance (GDPR, ISO 27001 / 42001, HIPAA)

Our stack

We 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 are

• You've owned production - been paged at 3am and made the right call
• You're calm when it's on fire - low ego, decisive under a Sev1
• You're disciplined - post-mortem rigour, honest error budgets, no cowboy deploys
• You build agentically - our engineers ship with Claude Code, and that excites you rather than threatens you

Why Talonic

• Co-authors of DIN SPEC 91491 (with Fraunhofer IIS, Humboldt-Innovation & DIN e.V.) - we help define this category's rules
• NVIDIA Inception member, backed by leading European deep-tech investors
• Enterprise traction at the inflection point where the platform has to be genuinely unbreakable

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.

The package

• Berlin, hybrid (CET ±2 for on-call)
• €80,000–€90,000 base + meaningful VSOP equity
• The reliability charter — yours to define, instrument, and grow

If 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.a i