Site Reliability Engineer

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 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, Tower Research, PDT Partners, SIG, and other top quantitative firms.

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 HTTP 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.

We accommodate 100% remote work, with teammates living around the globe and paid in their local currency.

The base salary range for this role is $150,000–$215,000, benchmarked to Tier 1 locations in each country. Total compensation may also include bonuses, commissions, and equity, depending on the role.

Notice about phishing scams

Be cautious of phishing scams impersonating Databento that offer fake job interviews and request purchases. Official emails come only from @databento.com or us.greenhouse-mail.io (our ATS). Any other domains (e.g., databento-careers.com, databento.online) are fraudulent.

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Databento, Inc. We comply with federal, state, and local nondiscrimination laws in every location where we operate. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leave, compensation, and training. Pursuant to applicable laws, we consider qualified applicants with arrest or conviction records. If you need an 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!