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

Yelp is a company that values individual authenticity and creative problem-solving within its engineering culture. They are seeking a Site Reliability Engineer to own the infrastructure and operational health of their real-time streaming platform, ensuring reliability and scalability while driving automation and self-service solutions.

Responsibilities:

• Own the reliability, scalability, and operational health of Kafka clusters across multi-cloud and hybrid environments
• Build and maintain automation for cluster operations, upgrades, capacity scaling, and incident recovery
• Partner with engineering teams to enable new streaming use cases, advise on best practices, and ensure data pipeline reliability
• Troubleshoot complex issues affecting data flow, performance, or stability, and lead root cause analyses
• Execute Kafka version upgrades and platform migrations with minimal disruption to critical services
• Participate in on-call rotations. Our geographically distributed SRE teams use a “follow-the-sun” model, so no one needs to be on-call 24 hours a day!

Requirements:

• Solid SRE or infrastructure engineering foundation: experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform), configuration management (Puppet, Ansible, or equivalent), cloud platforms (AWS preferred), and Linux operations
• Production level experience with Kafka or similar technologies at scale including cluster upgrades, migrations, and capacity planning
• Programming proficiency in Python, Java, or similar for tooling and automation
• Strong debugging and systems-thinking skills, comfortable tracing data flow issues end-to-end across distributed systems
• Experience with Apache Flink or other stream processing frameworks
• Familiarity with Kafka Client APIs (Producer, Consumer, Streams)
• Experience building internal self-service tooling or developer platforms
• Experience with incident response and management