AI Product Engineer (LLM Agents & SRE Automation) (f/m/x)

Team: Product & Engineering • Reports to the CTO

Location: Hybrid - Cologne (Rheinauhafen) - 3 days in office, 2 days remote (Tue and Thu)

Shape the future of autonomous incident response

We’re on a mission to make downtime invisible. Thousands of DevOps and SRE teams rely on ilert to detect, resolve, and communicate incidents faster.

As our first AI Product Engineer , you’ll build the core of ilert’s AI-first strategy: autonomous, tool-using agents that diagnose alerts, run root cause analysis, execute safe mitigations, and keep services healthy.

This is a hands-on role where you’ll turn operational expertise and product insight into real, reliable AI systems used in production.

Tasks

Design & Build AI Agents

• Design agent reasoning loops, prompts, and safety constraints.
• Build multi-step tool-using agents (logs, metrics, traces, k8s, Git, CI/CD, cloud APIs).
• Implement autonomy flows: investigation → analysis → mitigation → validation.

Ship Product Features

• Work with product and engineering to build AI-backed features that solve real customer problems.
• Translate complex SRE workflows into intuitive user experiences powered by AI.
• Own features end-to-end (design → prototype → implementation → rollout).

Integrate with Observability & Ops Tooling

• Connect LLM agents to Grafana, Prometheus, Kubernetes, GitHub, CI/CD, cloud services, etc.
• Design safe tool schemas and APIs for autonomous execution.

Ensure Reliability, Safety & Determinism

• Build guardrails for safe, reversible mitigations.
• Validate model output with structured schemas (e.g., Zod, JSON schema).
• Establish evaluation suites, test harnesses, and monitoring for agent performance.

Collaborate Across Teams

• Work with SREs to encode operational expertise into agents.
• Partner with Product to shape requirements and roadmap decisions.
• Influence ilert’s broader AI strategy.

Requirements

Must-Have Skills

• Experience building AI-powered applications with LLMs (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.)
• Strong prompt engineering & agent design skills
• Experience implementing multi-step tool-use flows
• Solid software engineering fundamentals (preferably Rust)
• Experience integrating with APIs, backend services, or automations
• Ability to reason about reliability, safety, and controlled automation
• Product mindset: able to turn ambiguous problems into shippable solutions

Nice-to-Have Skills

• Background in SRE, DevOps, or incident response
• Experience with observability tools (Grafana, Prometheus, Elastic, Datadog, New Relic)
• Hands-on Kubernetes knowledge
• Experience with production agent frameworks (ReAct, LangChain, LangGraph, custom state machines)

Soft Skills

• You love building real products, not demos
• Strong communication & critical thinking
• Comfortable working with high autonomy and ownership
• Passion for reliability, automation, and removing toil

Benefits

• Build one of the first real autonomous SRE agents in the industry
• Product-centric culture: Be part of a team that’s 100% committed to solving a critical issue for businesses that offer round-the-clock services.
• Hybrid Work Environment: Enjoy the best of both worlds with in-person collaboration and remote work flexibility.
• No Meetings #hackfwd: Maximize productivity by keeping meetings to a minimum and focusing on your core responsibilities.
• High impact, high ownership role. Your work ships to customers quickly
• Small, senior team with fast decision-making
• Modern tech stack + strong engineering culture
• Direct involvement in shaping the future of on‑call and incident responseFounder‑led startup

Please include one link (GitHub, repo, notebook, or demo) that best showcases your experience building AI-powered or agentic systems.