Introduction

Keep the world awake - Build the backbone of agentic incident response

ilert is the heart of the "always-on" business. Our backend systems process thousands of events per second, ensuring that when a critical system fails, the right person is notified within seconds.

We are looking for a Working Student or Intern who wants to go beyond "Todo List" apps and dive into high-performance, distributed backend architecture. You will help us build the resilient APIs and data processing pipelines that power our platform across AWS, Kubernetes, and beyond.

Tasks

• API Development: Design and implement robust RESTful APIs using modern backend languages (we mainly use Java and Rust - we're happy to see your preference!).
• Scalable Systems: Help us optimize our data ingestion pipelines and work with distributed systems like Kafka and ClickHouse.
• Database Management: Work with SQL and NoSQL databases to ensure data integrity and high performance at scale.
• AI & Automation: Support our AI SRE agent team by building the backend logic that enables automated incident resolution.
• Testing & Reliability: Write comprehensive unit and integration tests to ensure our services are mission-critical ready.
• Flexible Impact: Depending on business needs and your interest, you could work on anything from core alerting logic to complex integrations with third-party tools (Slack, MS Teams, Jira).

Requirements

• Current Student: Enrolled in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• Coding Foundation: You are proficient in at least one backend-heavy language (e.g., Go, Java, Python, or Node.js) and understand OOP or functional programming principles.
• Database Basics: You know your way around SQL and understand how to design efficient data models.
• CS Fundamentals: You have a solid understanding of algorithms, data structures, and how web servers work.
• Curiosity: You are interested in distributed systems, microservices, and "The Cloud."
• Language: Fluent English (our working language).

Benefits

Cologne, Germany (Hybrid)

Team: Engineering · Reports to: CTO / Engineering Lead Format: Working Student (16–20h/week) or Internship (3–6 months)

• Deep Tech: Solve real engineering challenges involving high availability and low latency.
• Hybrid Freedom: Join us in our Cologne Rheinauhafen office (3 days/week) and work from home (2 days/week).
• Your Studies First: We offer flexible scheduling to accommodate your lectures and exam seasons.
• Elite Mentorship: Work alongside senior engineers who have built systems at scale and are eager to mentor you.
• Focus Culture: We protect "maker time," prioritize deep work, and keep our meeting overhead low.

We value potential over perfection. If you love solving complex logic puzzles and building systems that "just work," we’d love to see what you’ve built!