Lead Site Reliability Engineer

Neon is an open-source company on a mission to enable developers to ship faster on a serverless platform (which is powered by Postgres at the bottom of its stack).

Are you an experienced Lead Site Reliability Engineer eager to lead a high-performing, remote team? Do you thrive on mentoring engineers, optimizing workflows, and driving innovation? If you're passionate about building scalable solutions, fostering collaboration, and making a real impact, we want to hear from you!

• Lead & Empower: Manage a high-performing distributed team (5+ engineers across the EU), creating a culture of growth, collaboration, and innovation.

• Remove Roadblocks: Identify and eliminate obstacles to maximize productivity and efficiency.

• Coach & Mentor: Spend significant time helping engineers grow, supporting career development, and evaluating performance.

• Optimize & Scale: Work closely with tech leads and product managers to refine processes, tackle tech debt, and ensure fast, high-quality delivery.

• Enhance Communication: Foster strong collaboration within the team and across departments.

• Drive Strategic Impact: Align infrastructure projects with broader business goals to maximize effectiveness.

• Maintain Reliability: Ensure a healthy and scalable on-call process for the team.

• Grow the Team: Expand our impact by recruiting and hiring top-tier Software Engineers.

• Engineering Leadership Experience: 2+ years in an Engineering Management role, plus 5+ years of hands-on coding experience.

• Cloud & Platform Expertise: Strong background in leading/building teams that build cloud services or platforms.

• Remote Team Management: Proven ability to lead and scale distributed teams across multiple time zones.

• Coaching & Communication: Strong mentoring skills, high emotional intelligence, and exceptional prioritization abilities.

• Execution & Delivery: Experience planning, shipping, and iterating on complex infrastructure projects with predictability.

• Problem-Solving Mindset: Ability to implement tools, processes, and unblock teams to drive continuous improvement.

• Technical Fluency

  • Cloud: Azure and/or AWS experience

  • Infrastructure: Kubernetes (multi-cluster, multi-cloud), Linux environments

  • Monitoring: Prometheus ecosystem (Grafana, Loki, Tempo, VictoriaMetrics)

  • Scalable & Repeatable Infrastructure: Focus on efficiency and automation

  • Debugging & Innovation: Love solving challenges with no easy answers

• Excellent English Communication: Native or near-native verbal and written skills.

• Curiosity & Growth: Passion for staying up to date with CS papers, trends, and best practices.

• Go, GitOps (Flux, ArgoCD), Postgres, Virtualization (QEMU/KVM)

• Contributing to open-source projects

Impact: Work on critical infrastructure projects that power our platform.

Growth: Lead a talented team and shape the future of our engineering culture.Flexibility: Fully remote with a distributed team across the EU.

Innovation: Be at the forefront of cloud technologies and DevOps best practices.

Neon is building open-source cloud-native PostgreSQL. Our architecture separates storage from compute, allowing for stateless and serverless Postgres. We’re a well funded startup with deep knowledge of Postgres internals and decades of experience building databases. We are a systems company; we work on low-level code with strict performance and correctness requirements.

Neon was created by a team of Postgres hackers, and led by CEO Nikita Shamgunov (co-founder of SingleStore). Neon is built on open-source principles and is focused on giving back to the Postgres and developer communities.

• We are a distributed team of 120+ people working from 25+ countries (concentrating around North America and Europe time zones)

• We are a team built on open sources cultural principles (transparency, contribution, accountability, proactivity)

• Team with decades of experience building databases and deep knowledge of Postgres internals. We are deeply technical

• We have experienced Postgres committers and hackers on the team (check Heikki, Anastasia, Arseny, Matthias profiles)

• We believe in the efficacy of collaborative open-source

• We aim for a diversity of thoughts and backgrounds

• We are keen to be a fast-moving, flat org and avoid hierarchical structures

• Top-tier investors backed up Neon's vision:

  • We raised $104 million in funding from Menlo Ventures, Notable Capital, Khosla Ventures, General Catalyst, and Founders Fund.

  • Venture vehicles of Snowflake and Databricks invested in Neon.

  • Our angel investors are prominent technologists, and ecosystem players. More than 20 awesome angels supported Neon, including Nat Friedman, Elad Gil, Mike Ovitz, Ajeet Singh, Guillermo Rauch, Søren Brammer Schmidt, and Wes McKinney.

  • Our Board includes Quentin Clark, Glenn Solomon, Joe Morrissey, and Tim Tully.

• You have an opportunity to be an early employee in the fast-scaling, ambitious team

• You can work 100% remote: we'll handle all formalities to arrange work from your home

• We grant equity (stock options) to all full-time hires

• We offer a competitive benefits package in line with all tech companies (top-notch equipment, private medical insurance, unlimited vacations, paid parental leaves, and much more)

• We are distributed, yet make our bonds during regular offsites (the last one was in Lisbon, Portugal)