Product Engineer (f/m/x)

<p><strong>Cologne, Germany (Hybrid)</strong></p> <p><strong>Team:</strong> Product & Engineering · <strong>Reports to:</strong> CTO · <strong>Format:</strong> Full-time, permanent</p> <p><strong>Own a piece of the product, not a ticket queue</strong></p> <p>ilert is the alerting, on-call and incident response platform that engineering teams worldwide rely on when things break. That covers alerting, on-call scheduling, call routing, status pages, and an AI SRE that investigates incidents alongside the people responding to them.</p> <p>We're bootstrapped, profitable, and small (~15 engineers). Your work reaches customers fast, and you have a real say in what gets built.</p> <p>We're looking for a <strong>Product Engineer</strong> to own one area of that product. We'll give you a domain, not a spec. You figure out what customers need, build it across the stack, ship it, and check whether it made a difference.</p> <p>We build with AI every day. But AI is leverage on top of engineering, not a substitute for it. We're looking for a solid engineer first, someone who uses AI to move faster, not to skip understanding the code.</p> <h2>Tasks</h2> <ul> <li><strong>Own a product domain end-to-end.</strong> Depending on where you'll have the most impact, that could be alerting, on-call and call routing, status pages, integrations, or our AI SRE. You propose what to build, build it, and measure whether it worked.</li> <li><strong>Ship across the stack.</strong> Java and Rust on the backend, React and TypeScript on the frontend. We work in 2-week bets that end in a production deploy.</li> <li><strong>Talk to customers.</strong> Join customer calls, read support conversations, dig into usage data, and turn what you learn into product improvements.</li> <li><strong>Make the scope calls.</strong> Decide what to cut, what ships first, and what to validate before building it. We trust you with these trade-offs.</li> <li><strong>Own it in production.</strong> You're responsible for what you ship, including when it breaks. Reliability is literally our product.</li> </ul> <h2>What you bring</h2> <ul> <li><strong>2+ years of software engineering in a team codebase.</strong> That means code review, tests, production incidents, and code you didn't write alone. Side projects are great, but they don't replace this.</li> <li><strong>You've shipped features end-to-end</strong> and cared whether people actually used them.</li> <li><strong>Comfortable across the stack.</strong> Strong on one side, and willing and able to work on the other.</li> <li><strong>Solid fundamentals.</strong> Data modeling, debugging, testing, and thinking through failure modes. You can read unfamiliar code and reason about it before you reach for a prompt.</li> <li><strong>Real AI fluency.</strong> You use AI coding tools every day, you know where they help and where they mislead, and you can defend a design decision without "the AI suggested it."</li> <li><strong>Product instinct.</strong> You have opinions about <em>what</em> to build, not just <em>how</em>.</li> <li><strong>Comfortable with ambiguity.</strong> A domain and a problem are enough for you to get going.</li> <li><strong>Fluent English</strong> (our working language).</li> <li><strong>Able to be in our Cologne office 3 days a week.</strong></li> </ul> <p><strong>Bonus</strong></p> <ul> <li>Experience at a B2B SaaS or developer-tools company</li> <li>Exposure to incident management, DevOps, SRE or on-call, or just real curiosity about it. The domain is learnable; we care more about how you build.</li> <li>Hands-on with Java, Rust, React or TypeScript</li> <li>Something you built that other people actually use (open source, a side project, an internal tool)</li> <li>German language skills</li> </ul> <h2>Benefits</h2> <ul> <li>🧭 <strong>Real Ownership:</strong> You decide what to build in your domain, not just how to build it.</li> <li>⚡ <strong>Ship Fast, See Impact:</strong> 2-week cycles with production deploys. Your work reaches customers in weeks, not quarters.</li> <li>🤖 <strong>AI in Production:</strong> Build on and next to an AI SRE that investigates real incidents for real customers. Human-AI collaboration in production, not a demo.</li> <li>🏡 <strong>Hybrid Freedom:</strong> Our office in <strong>Cologne Rheinauhafen</strong> with a roof terrace (3 days/week), plus work from home on Tuesdays and Thursdays.</li> <li>🌴 <strong>Focus > Meetings:</strong> We protect maker time, write things down async (Notion, Loom), and keep meetings rare.</li> <li>🎯 <strong>Direct Line to the Founders:</strong> You report to the CTO and work directly with the CEO on what to build.</li> <li>💪 <strong>Independent and Stable:</strong> Bootstrapped and profitable. We build for customers, not for the next funding round.</li> </ul> <p><strong>How to apply</strong></p> <p>No cover letter needed. Send your CV along with:</p> <ol> <li><strong>One link</strong> to something you shipped and are proud of (a product, a feature, a repo or a write-up), plus a sentence on what <em>your</em> part in it was.</li> <li><strong>A few lines</strong> on which part of ilert you'd want to own first, and why.</li> </ol> <p>If you're the kind of engineer who has opinions about what to build, not just how to build it, we want to talk to you.</p> <p><em>Keywords: Product Engineer, Full-Stack Engineer, Software Engineer, Java, Rust, React, TypeScript, B2B SaaS, Köln.</em></p><p>Find more <a href="https://www.arbeitnow.com/english-speaking-jobs">English Speaking Jobs in Germany</a> on Arbeitnow</a>