About Databento

The financial industry is evolving rapidly, but traditional data providers often lag with cumbersome onboarding, complex APIs, slow infrastructure, and high licensing costs.

Databento is the market data platform for modern finance, offering 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 combines the performance and reliability demanded by leading trading firms with a dramatically simpler developer experience. Our team comprises alumni from top quantitative firms like Two Sigma, Citadel Securities, Flow Traders, Tower Research, PDT Partners, and SIG.

The Role

We are seeking a midlevel or senior Individual Contributor (IC) to join our Backend Engineering team as a Site Reliability Engineer. In this role, you will be responsible for the uptime, performance, and observability of our platform, and you will help establish the standards for how the rest of the engineering team builds, ships, and monitors software.

The scope of problems you'll tackle is broad, including petabyte-scale data processing, SaaS challenges like customer management and billing, and the query systems that power our APIs. Unlike most finance firms, we are transparent about our technology and development processes.

Responsibilities

• Own uptime, SLAs, and SLOs across our API and platform services.
• Set reliability and operational best practices for other developers without hindering their productivity.
• Build and maintain observability across logging, metrics, and tracing.
• Design and implement 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 conduct post-incident reviews.
• Proactively identify areas for improvement and drive projects from conception 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 (e.g., 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.

Compensation & Benefits

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.

We offer health, dental, disability, and life insurance benefits, as well as 401(k) matching for full-time employees. We accommodate 100% remote work, with teammates living around the globe and paid in their local currency.