Site Reliability Engineer

About the role

The financial industry is growing at a record pace, but our data providers are still stuck in the past — with cumbersome onboarding processes, complicated APIs, slow infrastructure, and expensive licensing costs.

Databento is the market data platform for modern finance. The company provides real-time and historical data across futures, options, and equities through a unified API. By owning the entire market data stack end-to-end, Databento is the first platform of its kind to combine the performance and reliability demanded by the world's leading trading firms with a dramatically simpler developer experience. Our team includes alumni of Two Sigma, Citadel Securities, Flow Traders, IMC, Tower Research, Jump Trading, HRT, Jane Street, and SIG.

We're looking for a midlevel or senior IC to join our Backend Engineering team as a Site Reliability Engineer. You'll own the uptime, performance, and observability of our platform, and help set the standard for how the rest of engineering builds, ships, and monitors software.

The range of problems is wide. You'll work on petabyte-scale data processing, SaaS problems like customer management and billing, and the query systems that power our APIs. Unlike most finance firms, we're open about our tech and how we build it.

Responsibilities

- Own uptime, SLAs, and SLOs across our API and platform services.

- Set reliability and operational best practices for other developers without slowing them down.

- Build and maintain observability across logging, metrics, and tracing.

- Design and run high-availability deployment and containerization strategies.

- Profile and optimize Python applications for throughput, latency, and cost.

- Debug production issues down to the OS level using tools like strace, perf, eBPF, ss, and gdb.

- Improve deployment and CI/CD workflows.

- Join the on-call rotation, lead incident response, and run post-incident reviews.

- Find what needs fixing on your own, then take projects from idea to completion.

Preferred background

- Full-time experience in SRE, DevOps, or backend engineering, preferably at a trading firm, tech company, or high-growth startup.

- Hands-on experience with observability tooling for logging, metrics, and tracing (e.g. Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, VictoriaMetrics, Jaeger, Logstash, Loki, Vector).

- Experience with containerization and high availability deployment (e.g. Docker, Podman, Docker Compose, Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, k3s).

- Strong proficiency in Python, including application development and performance optimization.

- Comfortable with Linux debugging and profiling tools such as strace, perf, eBPF, ss, and gdb.

- A track record of measurable impact in a recent role, such as improving performance by X%, speeding something up Nx, or saving $Y per year.

- Experience with alerting and incident response best practices is a plus.