Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Data Infrastructure

As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer for Data Infrastructure at Chainlink Labs, you own the reliability and operational performance of large-scale distributed systems and data infrastructure. You strengthen the production operation of streaming and Kubernetes workloads while ensuring infrastructure changes are managed through repeatable, version-controlled practices. You improve the scalability and operational efficiency of the infrastructure that engineering teams depend on.

What you'll do

• Enable critical product initiatives to launch on time by delivering the streaming and data infrastructure required by CRE, CCIP, Data Feeds and Data Streams, translating product requirements into reliable Redpanda/Kafka and Flink capabilities.
• Maintain 99.9% availability for critical data infrastructure as usage grows, scaling streaming and Kubernetes workloads, resolving throughput and recovery bottlenecks, and defining SLIs that reflect the experience of consuming services.
• Keep operational maintenance below 20% of team capacity by reducing recurring incidents, manual interventions and routine maintenance through automation, actionable alerts, tested recovery procedures and repeatable vulnerability remediation.
• Reduce cost to serve and make consumption accountable by connecting Redpanda topic traffic, Flink processing and BigQuery usage to the teams and services consuming them.
• Increase infrastructure self-service and operational safety by establishing reusable infrastructure modules, deployment workflows and documentation that enable engineering teams to provision, test, scale and retire AWS and Kubernetes resources independently.
• Use service adoption and consumer needs to guide infrastructure improvements by establishing visibility into infrastructure consumers, service adoption, reliability, cost and maintenance effort.

What you bring

• Demonstrated experience operating large-scale distributed systems and scalable data processing infrastructure in production, including managing availability, consistency, failure modes and performance trade-offs.
• Hands-on experience operating Kafka or Kafka-compatible streaming platforms such as Redpanda in production, including capacity planning, performance tuning and troubleshooting.
• Experience provisioning and managing production infrastructure using Terraform, with version-controlled, reviewed and repeatable infrastructure changes.
• Experience deploying, operating and troubleshooting production Kubernetes workloads, including resource management, scaling and safe rollouts.

Nice to have

• Built reusable infrastructure modules, self-service capabilities and CI/CD workflows that enable engineering teams to deploy and operate services independently.
• Experience building and operating Apache Flink pipelines in production, including monitoring, diagnosing failures and managing recovery.
• Experience operating AWS Aurora/RDS in production, including provisioning, backup and recovery, failover, rightsizing and cost optimization.
• Advanced experience with one or more of Apache Flink, Redpanda/Kafka, Iceberg, PostgreSQL, Airflow or Trino, demonstrated through work with system internals, complex troubleshooting or performance optimization.
• Experience reading, debugging and writing production-quality code in Java and/or Go.
• Contributions to open-source infrastructure or data projects through code, tooling, documentation or actionable bug reports.

What we offer

• Global, remote-based role with overlap expected in Eastern Standard Time (EST) working hours.

About Chainlink Labs

Chainlink is the industry-standard oracle platform bringing capital markets onchain and powering the majority of decentralized finance. The Chainlink stack provides essential data, interoperability, compliance, and privacy standards for institutional tokenized assets, lending, payments, stablecoins and advanced blockchain use cases. Chainlink has enabled tens of trillions in transaction value and secures the vast majority of DeFi, adopted by major financial institutions including Swift, Euroclear, Mastercard, Fidelity International, UBS and leading protocols such as Aave, Lido and GMX.