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

Kafka Site Reliability Engineer

Yelp engineering culture is driven by our values: we're a cooperative team that values individual authenticity and encourages creative solutions to problems. All new engineers deploy working code their first week, and we strive to broaden individual impact with support from managers, mentors, and teams. At the end of the day, we're all about helping our users, growing as engineers, and having fun in a collaborative environment.

Do you want to help build and operate scalable, resilient systems that power Yelp's critical business functions? Our Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) ensure our services remain fast, reliable, and available, even as we grow and requirements evolve. As an SRE specializing in Kafka, you'll play a pivotal role in managing our real-time data streaming infrastructure and supporting event-driven applications at scale.

We work at the intersection of software development and distributed systems, owning the backbone of our organization's streaming architecture. As a Kafka SRE, you'll take on challenges only found at the kind of scale that supports global, always-on applications. Yelp processes massive amounts of user data daily—over 300 million business reviews, 100,000 photo uploads, and countless check-ins. Maintaining sub-minute data freshness with such high volume presents an exciting technical problem and a very interesting area to work in.

You'll drive best practices in automation and self-service, knowing that deploying or upgrading data streaming infrastructure should be as effortless as a git commit and code review away.

This opportunity is fully remote and does not require you to be located in any particular state within the US. We welcome applicants from throughout the US. We'd love to have you apply, even if you don't feel you meet every single requirement in this posting. At Yelp, we're looking for great people, not just those who simply check off all the boxes.

What You'll Do:

• Design, deploy, and maintain large-scale Kafka event streaming infrastructure across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
• Collaborate with engineers to enable new features, ensure data pipeline reliability, and advise on best practices for real-time data processing.
• Execute and automate Kafka cluster upgrades, migrations, and major version rollouts with minimal impact to critical services.
• Build or enhance self-service capabilities and automation for cluster operations, scaling, and incident recovery.
• Troubleshoot complex issues affecting data flow, performance, or stability, and drive root cause analyses.
• 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!

What It Takes To Succeed:

• Strong hands-on experience designing and implementing large-scale Kafka event streaming capabilities in production, across hybrid or multi-cloud and Linux environments, including upgrades and migrations between platforms or versions.
• In-depth knowledge of event streaming/data-in-motion design principles, architecture, and operational nuances.
• Programming proficiency in Java, Python, or similar modern languages for tooling, integration, and automation.
• Familiarity with Kafka Client APIs (Producer, Consumer, Streams), as well as sizing and capacity planning for high-throughput clusters.
• Experience designing and optimizing real-time data streaming solutions with technologies like Apache Flink.
• Knowledge of automating infrastructure and operational tasks (configuration management, IaC, scripting, or related).
• Problem-solving mindset with an eagerness to learn, take initiative, and advocate for infrastructure best practices in a fast-paced environment.
• A Bachelor's Degree or an equivalent work experience is required.

What You'll Get:

• There are a variety of factors that go into determining a compensation range, including but not limited to external market benchmark data and years of experience. Based on the anticipated level of experience that we are seeking, we expect the compensation range for this role to be between $141,000 and $216,000. The actual compensation offered may be influenced by a variety of factors, including the candidate's experience and skill set.
• There may be flexibility with the range included in this posting should a candidate be leveled higher or lower than the posted range.
• This opportunity has the option to be fully remote in all locations across the US.
• You can find more information about Yelp's five star benefits here!

At Yelp, we believe that diversity is an expression of all the unique characteristics that make us human: race, age, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, disability, and education — and those are just a few. We recognize that diverse backgrounds and perspectives strengthen our teams and our product. The foundation of our diversity efforts are closely tied to our core values, which include "Playing Well With Others" and "Authenticity." We're proud to be an equal opportunity employer and consider qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, age, genetic information, sexual orientation, gender identity, marital or family status, veteran status, medical condition or disability. Actual salary offered may vary based on multiple factors, including but not limited to, an individual's location and experience. We will consider for employment qualified candidates with arrest and conviction records, consistent with applicable law (including, for example, the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance for roles based in San Francisco, the Los Angeles County Fair Chance Ordinance for roles based in the unincorporated areas of Los Angeles County, and the California Fair Chance Act for roles based in California). Where required by law, a criminal background check will not be conducted until after a conditional offer of employment is made, and any evaluation of a candidate's criminal background check will be subject to an individualized assessment that takes into account the candidate's specific criminal records and the responsibilities and requirements of the particular role. We are committed to providing reasonable accommodations for individuals with disabilities in our job application process. If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, you may contact us at View email address on click.appcast.io or View phone number on click.appcast.io.