seeking a Site Reliability Engineer to join a dedicated operational support team for Booking.com's Kafka and infrastructure engineering organization. engagement with potential to evolve into project-based work as the team matures. The role covers an setting of ~600 servers plus Kubernetes pods/services, primarily on-premises bare metal infrastructure with a planned transition toward virtualized environments. The engineer will operate as part of a 4-member India-based team providing first-line operational support, reducing the load on Booking's core Kafka/infra engineering teams, with escalations only routed to Booking when they cannot be resolved internally
Roles and Responsibilities
Perform vulnerability management and remediation, including patching within defined SLAs (critical vulnerabilities)
Execute OS and Kafka upgrades, reinstalls, and migrations across the setting
Conduct health checks, monitoring, and proactive alert handling across ~600 servers and Kubernetes-based services
Own incident response and troubleshooting for operational issues,
escalating to Booking engineering only when unresolved at the first line
Handle change requests and day-to-day operational support tasks
Manage customer support requests and escalations, including on-call rotation coverage
Coordinate with vendors and internal security teams to assess impact and apply fixes for identified vulnerabilities
Develop and improve automation and repeatable procedures to reduce manual operational overhead
Participate in onboarding/knowledge transfer during ramp-up to build operational maturity on Booking's Kafka and infrastructure stack
Support and administer AWS cloud infrastructure (EC2, VPC, IAM, S3, EKS/Kubernetes, CloudWatch) as the setting transitions from on-premises bare metal toward virtualized/cloud infrastructure
Design, implement, and maintain infrastructure-as-code (Terraform/CloudFormation) for provisioning and managing AWS resources supporting Kaf