SRE — Kafka/Infrastructure Operational Support

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 environment 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 environment
• 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 environment 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 Kafka and platform services
• Own infrastructure reliability and capacity planning across hybrid (on-prem + AWS) environments, including scaling, failover, and disaster recovery readiness
• Implement and maintain observability tooling (CloudWatch, Prometheus/Grafana, or equivalent) for infrastructure and application-level monitoring
• Ensure AWS environment security posture — IAM least-privilege access, security group/network hardening, and compliance with vulnerability remediation SLAs
• Collaborate with the DevOps/platform team on CI/CD pipeline support for infrastructure changes and deployments