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