Hybrid SRE Lead

at Upvest

• Job title: SRE Lead
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Senior
• Salary: Not specified
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: Google Cloud Platform, Kafka, Kubernetes, Postgres, Go
• Location requirements: Hybrid, Berlin, Germany

About the role

• SRE Lead architecting reliability practices for Upvest, a fintech driving easy investment through innovation. Shape reliability standards and mentor SREs in a fast-paced environment.

Responsibilities

• Establish SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets that become the shared language of engineering velocity and stability.
• Design chaos experiments, redundancy patterns, and failover strategies that validate resilience before customers ever see an issue.
• Transform how we respond to and learn from incidents, turning chaos into confidence through world-class runbooks and post-mortem culture.
• Drive load testing, benchmarking, and architecture reviews that ensure we can handle 10x our current scale.
• Eliminate toil ruthlessly. Build tools that let engineers focus on value, not repetitive operational drudgery.
• Define the principles and patterns (circuit breakers, bulkheading, graceful degradation, intelligent rate limiting) that make our services antifragile.
• Validate system behavior under synthetic load and adversarial conditions, proving our defenses work before attackers or traffic spikes test them.

Requirements

• Deep SRE Mastery: years in high-stakes environments (FinTech, payments, banking, trading, mission-critical SaaS) where downtime has real consequences.
• Technical Depth: hands-on expertise with SLOs, chaos engineering, observability, automation, and the discipline of eliminating toil.
• Systems Thinking: you understand resilience architecture deeply. You design systems that fail gracefully, not engineers who scramble desperately.
• Influence Without Authority: exceptional communication and stakeholder management skills. You can change minds and shape culture through clarity, not mandates.
• Leadership DNA: proven ability to hire A-players, mentor engineers, and guide career growth while setting technical direction.
• Bonus points: Investment Industry Fluency: understanding our domain means your SRE decisions align with business reality, not just technical ideals.
• Stack Familiarity: experience with Golang, Kubernetes, GCP, Postgres, Kafka, or Datadog accelerates your impact.

Benefits

• We're working on solving a hard problem: Fixing the European securities financial infrastructure that empowers more people to be able to invest.
• We invest in you: From access to a personal coach, development budget, and plenty of opportunities to grow in your role.
• We live a culture of empowerment: We trust that we hire the best people and get out of their way. We value openness—there's a greater advantage in sharing information than keeping it to ourselves.
• Flexible work environment: While we're not quite fully remote, we are committed to being a flexible employer, as we understand you don't have to be in the office to do your best work.