Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE / Backend) f/m/d

Tech·Berlin· Hybrid

Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE / Backend) f/m/d

About the Role

We're looking for a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to take ownership of the infrastructure behind our platform. We run web applications and two mobile apps entirely on AWS, built around serverless and event-driven services and managed with Terraform.

This is a hands-on role with real ownership — you'll set the standards for how we run production rather than inherit someone else's. The split is roughly 70% infrastructure and reliability work, 30% backend development. Most of your time goes to the platform, but you'll be comfortable dropping into the application code to debug a slow query, fix a Lambda, or ship an endpoint alongside the product team.

Because we handle sensitive mental health data, reliability and security aren't abstract goals here. When someone books a session in a difficult moment, our platform needs to work.

🚀 What you'll do

• Own our AWS infrastructure end to end — Lambda, ECS Fargate, SQS, SNS, EventBridge, SES, Cognito, DynamoDB, RDS Postgres, and DMS
• Manage everything as code in Terraform, with well-designed modules, clean state management, and a solid review workflow
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines with safe rollout and rollback across web, mobile backends, and infrastructure
• Design our event-driven services for resilience: retries, dead-letter queues, idempotency, graceful degradation
• Own our Datadog and Sentry setup — define SLOs, build dashboards, and keep alerting actionable instead of noisy
• Lead incident response and run blameless postmortems that actually change how we build
• Harden our security posture: IAM, secrets management, network boundaries, Cognito auth flows, and vulnerability remediation
• Protect sensitive health data and support our GDPR and compliance requirements
• Monitor and optimize AWS spend without compromising reliability
• Contribute to backend development — APIs, event consumers, data pipelines, and Postgres and DynamoDB performance
• Participate in architectural discussions and mentor engineers on operational excellence

👀 What we're looking for

Must-have

• 5+ years in SRE, DevOps, platform, or backend engineering, with real production ownership
• Deep AWS experience across serverless and containers — Lambda, ECS Fargate, and debugging both under pressure
• Strong Terraform skills, including module design and managing state across multiple environments
• Hands-on experience with event-driven architecture (SQS, SNS, EventBridge) and a healthy respect for its failure modes
• Solid PostgreSQL: query tuning, indexing, connection management, and zero-downtime migrations
• Production experience with Datadog or a comparable observability platform (Grafana, New Relic, Honeycomb)
• Comfortable writing production backend code in [Python / Node.js / Go]
• Genuine on-call and incident response experience — you've led an incident and written the postmortem
• Strong security fundamentals: IAM, least privilege, secrets, network isolation, common web vulnerabilities
• Pragmatic about complexity — you reach for the simplest thing that meets the reliability bar
• Effective communicator who can explain a technical tradeoff without jargon

Nice-to-have

• AWS DMS or other data migration and replication tooling
• Compliance experience (GDPR, SOC 2, ISO 27001)
• Experience in a B2B SaaS environment or healthcare-related product

🤩 What you get

• Real ownership: a small team, short feedback loops, and no layers of approval between you and production
• Work that matters: the reliability you build directly affects people reaching for mental health support
• Free access to the nilo app (incl. family support)
• A dedicated learning budget for your personal and professional development
• Work abroad for up to 90 days per year (within the EU)
• Hybrid working model: 2 days/week from the office, 3 days from home
• Urban Sports Club membership at a discounted price
• Equity options: you benefit from any increase in nilo's valuation that you've helped to create
• Regular team and company events
• Bring your dog to work: we have 4 office dogs

nilo embraces diversity. We strive to create an inclusive workplace where everyone feels welcome, psychologically and physically safe. All applicants will be considered for employment without regard to different ethnic/racial origins, age groups, religions/ideologies, sexual orientations, gender identities, abilities, socio-economic statuses, educational backgrounds, family arrangements and/or any other characteristic.

We would like to encourage you to apply even if the technical requirements cannot be met 100%.