We are building the backbone of our customers’ products. Hundreds of companies architect around our API. That means if we design the wrong product or go down, hundreds of customers will have a major issue.
We are very considerate about balancing where we can move fast because of cheap and reversible decisions vs. where we need to be extra diligent because of expensive one-way doors. We are building an API product, therefore we need to avoid breaking changes early. We put high emphasis on focusing on the most important thing and doing that very well. That comes at the tradeoff of sometimes moving slower on projects to do them well, delaying promises with customers, or letting many small fires burn in order to get the most important thing done.
We always try to uncover what customers actually need, not what they ask for. We take high ownership of actually solving the problem for our customer, not just shipping a feature to spec. If you launch a feature and see that it’s not solving the problem yet, it’s your obligation to bring that up and improve the feature.
We are living a culture of caring candidly at Kombo. Being honest and direct about the feedback you give and receive, while actually caring about the success of others and your surroundings. It’s everyone’s obligation to disagree with managers and peers when you see an issue. If you like first-principles-thinking, you will feel home at Kombo.
We intentionally keep all processes lean so that engineers are as little constrained by others as possible. High quality work is highly appreciated and preferred over shortcuts. The calendar of an engineer shouldn’t be filled with meetings. Most engineers only have a daily 5 minute stand-up, right before lunch, and 1-2 meetings with customers or to unblock their projects per week. Mornings at Kombo are meeting free focus time.
We have a strong culture of writing things down and making knowledge accessible to the team. We write design docs and RFCs, every meeting gets recorded and the transcript is shared. That allows you to find the reasons behind almost all decisions. Many new joiners said they were surprised by how much we avoid BS. My favorite quote is: Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.
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You love building things and take pride in your engineering work. You will be among peers at Kombo.
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You get excited about technical problems without an obvious root cause. You form hypotheses, follow the evidence across application code, databases, and infrastructure, and keep investigating until you understand what is actually happening.
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You care about how systems behave in production. You think about performance, failure modes, rollout safety, and how you will know whether a change works before shipping it.
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You enjoy working across boundaries. You may change backend code, infrastructure, observability, or developer tooling depending on what the problem requires. You do not need to be an expert in all of these areas already, but you are excited to learn them deeply.
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You take ownership of ambiguous problems and communicate progress, blockers, and uncertainty clearly without needing to be managed closely.
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You appreciate radically candid feedback and want to work in an environment where you can also give it.
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You love the energy of being in the office, contribute actively to that environment, and work alongside motivated people.
Putting it differently; why you shouldn’t apply
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You want to work almost exclusively on cloud infrastructure and rarely touch application code.
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You enjoy writing backend code but have little interest in how it performs or fails in production.
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Your instinct is to apply generic industry best practices rather than understand the problem and reason from first principles.
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You are looking for a remote-friendly environment where the default is working from home. We do make exceptions (e.g. working remote while spending time with your family away from Berlin, or having a handyman at home).
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You like getting well prepared work assigned and not having to think about the order or communication. You will not get any specced tickets at Kombo.
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You dislike the discomfort of giving or receiving radically candid feedback.
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You’re looking for a chill job. Everyone at Kombo loves what they do, and everyone comes with the intention of pushing hard.