Site Reliability Engineer

About Tinybird:
At Tinybird, we help developers and data teams take flight by unlocking the power of real-time data to quickly build data pipelines and innovative data products. With Tinybird, you can effortlessly ingest multiple data sources at scale, query and shape it using the 100% pure SQL you already know and love, and publish results as low-latency, high-concurrency APIs for your applications to chirp about. Developers can create fast APIs, faster—what used to take hours and days now only takes minutes! Tinybird is the essential tool that data engineers and software developers have been waiting for enabling you to drive innovation with ease.

What you will be doing: We are looking for someone to help us scale and to keep our software and infrastructure reliable and elastic as we scale. Someone who knows how to make hardware and software play together, and that participate as part of the oncall team, to understand not only our product, but also the issues our clients face.:
• ‍We run our stack in Linux. We try to keep things simple. Technologies we use:
• OpenResty: SSL termination and load balancing
• Varnish: load balancing and, sometimes, caching
• Redis: metadata store
• Python: most of our backend uses Python except some small bits that rely on C++ for hot paths
• ClickHouse: our main data store
• Zookeeper: for ClickHouse replicas coordination
• We use Grafana, Loki and Mimir for monitoring and alerting
• Terraform: Cloud provisioning (virtual machines, networks, Kubernetes clusters)
• Ansible: Deploys and software and config provisioning
• Kubernetes: the base of our infrastructure. Most of our infra runs on top of it, and autoscaling is key
• We operate a large-scale distributed system where efficiency matters. This is not just about automating infrastructure—it’s about building and evolving a self-service platform that makes the most of the underlying hardware, adapts to workload changes, and autoscale itself accordingly. You’ll be working closely with the product and backend teams to design the system architecture, optimize usage of resources, and make our platform more elastic and autonomous.
• You’ll need to understand how ClickHouse works under the hood and how to extract the best possible performance from it.

Some challenges and things we want to improve:

• High availability and elasticity: As our customer base grows, the system must scale automatically and efficiently, without manual intervention. The platform should make capacity decisions on its own, in a transparent and safe way.
• Observability: From low-level resource usage to high-level service metrics. Good understanding of storage, networking, and compute is a must.
• Disaster recovery: Better tooling, better incident discovery, better on-call experience.

What you bring::
• Experience designing, building and running distributed Cloud architectures and large scale web based applications. That is, in so many words, what you will be responsible for at Tinybird
• Programming skills and willingness to dive into our codebase, ClickHouse source code, or any other software we use in order to figure out how things work. At Tinybird, we work mostly with Python and C++
• Accountable and enthusiastic to take on the responsibility of designing and managing the platform, and an urge to take on things that may be broken. Unafraid to break stuff because you own it and can fix it if need be.
• Bias for action, iteration and delivery. Conscious that often decisions can be reversed quickly and that speed is of the essence in business and technology
• That you think in terms of systems and you are attuned to edge cases, failure modes, behaviors, specific implementations
• Comfortable collaborating and communicating asynchronously, but expect direct communication within the team on a daily basis
• Build software with empathy, ensuring it's intuitive and maintainable. Document key insights and solutions to make it easy for everyone to understand and use without needing extensive documentation
• Experience with OpenResty, Varnish, Redis, Terraform or Ansible would be great for you to get up and running quickly, but we don’t bring you here to tell you what the right technologies are: rather we expect you to recommend the right one for each challenge
• Experience with ClickHouse and/or rolling out database systems at scale would be a huge plus.
• Deep expertise in Kubernetes: you should be comfortable designing and operating production-grade clusters, writing custom controllers or operators when needed, and tuning autoscaling mechanisms (KEDA, Karpenter,...) to adapt to real-time workloads. You should understand how Kubernetes handles networking, storage, scheduling, and resource management under the hood, and be able to reason about performance and failure scenarios at scale
• Proficiency working with AWS and GCP cloud providers

#LI-Remote

How We Work:
We’re a fully remote company, committed to a remote-first culture.
With offices in Madrid and New York City, we love face-to-face interactions, you can visit whenever it suits you!
As we’re in the early stages, your contributions will have a significant impact on everything we do.
We believe in transparency, so you’ll always be in the loop about what’s happening.
Check out our blog or follow us on LinkedIn to find out more about what’s important to us.