Site Reliability Engineer, Core Streaming (Remote - United States)

Role overview

Yelp is hiring a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) specializing in Kafka to design, deploy, and operate large-scale, resilient event streaming systems. You’ll help maintain low-latency, always-on streaming infrastructure that supports Yelp’s real-time data processing and event-driven applications.

Responsibilities

• Design, deploy, and maintain large-scale Kafka event streaming infrastructure across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
• Collaborate with engineers to enable new features and ensure pipeline reliability for real-time data processing.
• Execute and automate Kafka cluster upgrades, migrations, and major version rollouts with minimal impact.
• Build/enhance self-service and automation for cluster operations, scaling, and incident recovery.
• Troubleshoot complex issues affecting data flow, performance, or stability and lead root cause analyses.
• Participate in on-call rotations using a “follow-the-sun” model (not 24/7 personal on-call).

Requirements

• Hands-on experience implementing large-scale Kafka event streaming in production across hybrid/multi-cloud and Linux.
• In-depth knowledge of event streaming/data-in-motion architecture and operational practices.
• Programming proficiency in Java, Python, or similar languages for tooling/integration/automation.
• Familiarity with Kafka Client APIs (Producer/Consumer/Streams), including sizing/capacity planning for high-throughput clusters.
• Experience designing/optimizing real-time streaming solutions with Apache Flink.
• Experience automating operations with configuration management, IaC, and/or scripting.
• Bachelor’s degree or equivalent experience.

Nice-to-haves

• Strong initiative and problem-solving mindset focused on automation, reliability, and infrastructure best practices in a fast-paced environment.