Senior Site Reliability Engineer II (Kafka)

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Requirements:

• 5+ years of experience as a Software, DevOps, or Site Reliability Engineer
• 3+ years of Data Streaming Reliability Engineering
• Experience in monitoring, troubleshooting, and optimizing Kafka streaming applications, including diagnosing lag, partition imbalances, consumer group issues, and broker failures
• Expertise in setting up alerting, dashboards, and runbooks for high-availability and fault-tolerant streaming pipelines
• 3+ years of Kafka performance tuning & automation
• Strong background in scaling Kafka clusters, tuning producer/consumer configurations, and managing schema evolution.
• Proficiency in infrastructure automation (Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes) and CI/CD practices to streamline deployments and ensure resilient data streaming workflows.
• You think about systems - interfaces, boundaries, edge cases, failure modes, behaviors, specific implementations
• Have an urge to collaborate, document, and deliver quickly
• Have an enthusiastic, go-for-it attitude. When you see something broken, you can't help but fix it
• Have a desire to solve everyday challenges facing software engineers and automate their toil away
• Have an excellent ability to manage multiple tasks and expectations at once
• Know your way around Linux and Unix Shell.
• Have strong programming skills - Ruby and/or Go preferred
• Have experience with Docker, Kubernetes, Terraform, or similar IaC technologies
• Have experience with MongoDB, Redis, Kafka, Postgres, or similar data technologies

Responsibilities:

• Partner with Braze’s engineering teams on: Architecting products to effectively utilize infrastructure platforms in a scalable, reliable manner
• Debugging reliability and scalability issues across all stack layers, including the products built using our infrastructure platforms
• Make monitoring and alerting alerts on symptoms and not on outages
• Ensure that Braze meets our strict enterprise-grade SLAs with customers
• Develop Braze’s internal platform infrastructure: Create Infrastructure as code using Chef, Terraform, and Kubernetes
• Develop deployment pipelines for applications in multiple languages using Docker, Kubernetes, etc.
• Provide centralized/common tooling, services, and automation frameworks that are critical for scaling operations, capacity management, reducing operational pain, and improving the day-to-day workflow of Braze’s engineering teams
• Manage incidents: Be on a PagerDuty rotation to respond to availability incidents and provide support for other engineers
• Use your on-call shift to prevent incidents from ever happening
• Retrospect everything that happens to turn lessons into system improvements/changes, automation, etc.