Site Reliability Engineer

Job Description

Job Description

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 next generation market data provider with the radical idea that you should only pay for the data that you use. We power the world's largest finance and fintech institutions and lower the barrier of entry for small startups, gaining over 4,000 users during our first year of launch. Our team brings former experience at the world's leading quantitative firms, including Two Sigma, Flow Traders, Tower Research, PDT Partners, SIG, and more.

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.
• Familiarity with configuration management or infrastructure-as-code tools (Ansible, Terraform) is also helpful.
• Bonus if you've done benchmarking, load testing, and capacity planning.
• Database schema design and query optimization skills are nice to have.
• Good communication skills and work ethic for a remote workplace.
• An interest in financial data or algorithmic trading.

Notice about phishing scams

Be cautious of phishing scams impersonating Databento that may offer a job interview and request that you make a purchase through a phishing link. All official Databento emails come from databento.com or, occasionally, us.greenhouse-mail.io (as Greenhouse.io is our ATS). Any other domains—such as databento-careers.com, databento.online, databento.io, databento.us, etc.—are fake.

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Databento, Inc. provides equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, veteran status, or genetics. In addition to federal law requirements, Databento complies with applicable state and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment in every location in which the company has facilities. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation, and training. Pursuant to applicable laws, we will consider for employment qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records. And if you believe that you will need any type of accommodation, please let us know.

Our recruiting data suggests that underrepresented applicants often downplay their skills. Even if your experience doesn't exactly match the qualifications listed, we still want to hear from you. Please apply!