Senior Backend Engineer (Platform Team)

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. 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.

We reached product-market fit about 1.5 years ago. 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've raised $30M of total funding to date.

This is a Berlin-based on-site role.

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.

Example projects: migrating all our API services from Cloud Run to Kubernetes; investigating and fixing memory leaks in our Node.js application using heap snapshots and allocation profiles; investigating Postgres performance bottlenecks using query plans and production traces; designing a new scalable storage layer using Google Cloud Storage and Parquet; building static egress IP infrastructure; moving alerting and on-call to incident.io with Terraform-managed alert policies; improving local developer tooling with Cursor/Claude/Codex workflows.

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 environments.
• Observability and incident response.
• Security or compliance work.
• Low-level networking or operating-system knowledge.

The Environment at Kombo

We are building the backbone of our customers' products. 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 put high emphasis on focusing on the most important thing and doing that very well. We are living a culture of caring candidly at Kombo.

Hiring Process

1. Quick call with our recruiter.
2. 45 minute Deep Dive call with the hiring manager.
3. Tech Interview with the hiring manager and another engineer — presenting a past project.
4. Paid on-site day working in the office on a real challenge.