Senior Backend Engineer (Platform Team)

Über diese Stelle

Hey, I'm Niklas https://www.linkedin.com/in/niklashigi/, 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.

This is a Berlin-based on-site role.

WHAT WE ARE BUILDING

We are building the infrastructure platform that HR tech products are built on, from emerging category leaders like Juicebox https://juicebox.ai/ to established players like Indeed.com http://Indeed.com. Because my three co-founders and I are engineers ourselves, we were always drawn to the deeply technical problems. That's how we ended up building infrastructure for HR tech providers.

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. You can read more about our product here: What is the Kombo product? https://app.notion.com/p/What-is-the-Kombo-product-2fb6526d848a806793d1ccde34243879?pvs=21

We reached product-market fit about 1.5 years ago. Since then, both our revenue and product usage picked up with insane growth. Currently, we are at >10M annual recurring revenue, power integrations for more than 15,000 companies, and sync data of more than 250 million people globally. We are setting the standard for how companies build product on top of the most complicated enterprise systems. We’ve raised $30M of total funding to date and our growth rate puts us in the top 5% of VC funded startups worldwide.

PLATFORM ENGINEERING AT KOMBO

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.

This is not a traditional infrastructure or SRE role.

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. Deep prior expertise in every part of our stack is not required, but strong software engineering fundamentals and genuine excitement about infrastructure-heavy problems are.

Just some examples of projects you would’ve worked on in the past:

- migrating all our API services from Cloud Run to Kubernetes, including autoscaling, graceful shutdown, traffic routing, and production health dashboards

- investigating and fixing memory leaks in our Node.js application using heap snapshots, allocation profiles, and garbage collection metrics

- investigating Postgres performance bottlenecks using query plans and production traces, then improving queries and designing appropriate indexes

- designing and rolling out a new scalable and more cost-efficient storage layer for our customer-facing logs product using Google Cloud Storage and Parquet

- building a flexible static egress IP infrastructure so integration partners and enterprise customers can allowlist Kombo traffic

- moving alerting and on-call from OpsGenie to incident.io http://incident.io, including team routing, priorities, severity tagging, and Terraform-managed alert policies

- collaborating with our ATS Product Engineering team to design a new syncing approach that fixes timeout and rate limiting troubles when synchronizing data for large ATS tenants

- improving local developer tooling with Cursor/Claude/Codex workflows, VS Code tasks, Git hooks, gcloud auth helpers, and CI automation

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.

WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR

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.

WHAT MATTERS MOST

- Strong backend engineering fundamentals and experience building production services, APIs, and database-backed systems

- 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

- Curiosity and the ability to learn unfamiliar parts of a system quickly

STRONG SIGNALS

- Deep experience with TypeScript and Node.js

- 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

- Experience with distributed systems, internal tooling, or shared backend infrastructure

HELPFUL, BUT NOT REQUIRED

- Kubernetes, GCP, and Terraform

- CI/CD systems and local development…