Director, SRE

payrails

payrails

Berlin, Germany
Posted on Oct 15, 2024
The Company
Payrails is an innovative technology company with a team that has many years of experience in the payment industry and a real-life understanding of the merchants’ needs. We have seen the complexity firsthand and we have learned from all the challenges we've faced. Now we want to help leading technology companies around the world accept payments and build financial services with minimal upfront investments.

Our vision at Payrails is to reimagine payments. We do this by removing heavy reliance on Engineering efforts using composable building blocks that put the control firmly in the hands of our customers. We exist to help our customers become more productive and flexible, impacting directly on their ability to grow.

We are joined in our mission by top-tier investors Andreessen Horowitz​, ​HV Capital, EQT and General Catalyst​ alongside a great cast of knowledgeable angel investors to enable us to solve the growing complexity of payments.

At Payrails, we are committed to building a team full of the most talented people. Excellence is part of our values and we understand that in order to achieve this, we need to build an environment where skilled people can work openly, collaboratively, and with the utmost trust in one another. We believe people thrive the most when they are fully aware of what the business is trying to achieve, why it is important to the market, and what challenges lie in the way to reaching our goals. In such an environment we believe people can truly excel, grow and enjoy working together. We try hard to be a company where everyone is inspired and feels a sense of responsibility to do the right thing to help us bring our vision to life. Succeeding with us is about finding solutions to the most pressing problems and executing them effectively.
Your Team

Payrails is a true tech company: our Product is designed by engineers for engineers. We believe in quality before delivery: our mission is to provide an outstanding Payment experience with a strong eye on automation, resilience, and scalability. Our engineering culture is focused on 3 main pillars:

  • We aim for operational excellence

  • We promote open communication and quick feedback

  • We share knowledge and learn continuously

Our Tech team offers you the chance to work alongside a group of highly ambitious and knowledgeable Engineers while being faced with complex problems that affect customers on a global scale.

What You will be doing
  • Lead and mentor a team of SREs, fostering a culture of reliability, scalability, and automation across the organization.

  • Partner with Engineering and Product teams to advise, design, and implement reliable, scalable, and observable systems.

  • Set the strategic direction for Payrails' SRE scope and promote the SRE mindset across the organization.

  • Drive the automation of repetitive tasks and the reduction of manual toil, promoting operational efficiency and improving incident response.

  • Oversee root cause analysis efforts and guide teams in identifying and resolving systemic issues in both software and infrastructure.

  • Lead cloud infrastructure rightsizing initiatives and champion FinOps efforts to optimize costs and resources.

  • Establish SRE best practices, develop frameworks for incident management, and ensure alignment with business objectives.

Our Tech Stack
  • Orchestration: AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, Terragrunt

  • Continuous integration and delivery: GitHub Actions, FluxCD

  • Static Application Security Testing: Semgrep, Trivy

  • Observability: Prometheus, Cortex, Loki, Tempo, Grafana

  • Applications: Golang, Temporal, Cassandra, Postgres

You'll be great for this role if
  • You have extensive experience leading SRE or DevOps teams in large-scale, cloud-based environments, especially AWS.

  • You have a strong understanding of observability, reliability, scalability, and security best practices.

  • You bring strategic leadership and can align technical efforts with broader company goals.

  • You are proficient in Golang or eager to support a team working with it.

  • You have excellent communication skills and can influence cross-functional teams.

  • You are passionate about innovation, constantly learning, and eager to introduce new approaches to improve operational resilience.

Why You should join Payrails
  • You can truly create your own path by taking responsibility and implementing your own ideas
  • We offer visa and relocation support to you and your family where required
  • We offer a hybrid working environment
  • You have 27 annual vacation days + 1 day of paid birthday leave for you to have fun and party without any worries!
  • We get together regularly for team lunches and events
  • You help us shape the future of payments
At Payrails, we prioritize a culture of inclusivity and diversity, evaluating candidates solely based on their skills and potential, regardless of age, gender, identity, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability status, or religion. We welcome applications from individuals of all backgrounds and identities. In line with our commitment to fairness, we kindly request applicants to refrain from including personal details such as a picture, age, or marital status in their CVs.