Senior Site Reliability Engineer, Data Infrastructure

About Chainlink
Chainlink is the industry-standard oracle platform bringing the capital markets onchain and powering the majority of decentralized finance (DeFi). The Chainlink stack provides the essential data, interoperability, compliance, and privacy standards needed to power advanced blockchain use cases for institutional tokenized assets, lending, payments, stablecoins, and more. Since inventing decentralized oracle networks, Chainlink has enabled tens of trillions in transaction value and now secures the vast majority of DeFi.

Many of the world’s largest financial services institutions have also adopted Chainlink’s standards and infrastructure, including Swift, Euroclear, Mastercard, Fidelity International, UBS, S&P Dow Jones Indices, FTSE Russell, WisdomTree, ANZ, and top protocols such as Aave, Lido, GMX and many others. Chainlink leverages a novel fee model where offchain and onchain revenue from enterprise adoption is converted to LINK tokens and stored in a strategic Chainlink Reserve. Learn more at chain.link.

About the Role

The Senior Site Reliability Engineer will own the reliability and operational performance of large-scale distributed systems and data infrastructure. This role will strengthen the production operation of streaming and Kubernetes workloads while ensuring infrastructure changes are managed through repeatable, version-controlled practices. The role will also improve the scalability and operational efficiency of the infrastructure that engineering teams depend on.

Your Impact

• Enable critical product initiatives to launch on time. Deliver 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. Scale streaming and Kubernetes workloads, resolve throughput and recovery bottlenecks, and define SLIs that reflect the experience of consuming services.

• Keep operational maintenance below 20% of team capacity. Reduce 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. Connect Redpanda topic traffic, Flink processing and BigQuery usage to the teams and services consuming them.

• Increase infrastructure self-service and operational safety. Establish 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. Establish visibility into infrastructure consumers, service adoption, reliability, cost and maintenance effort.
  

Requirements

• Demonstrated experience operating large-scale distributed systems and scalable data processing infrastructure in production, including managing availability, consistency, failure modes and performance trade-offs.

• Operated Kafka or Kafka-compatible streaming platforms such as Redpanda in production, with hands-on experience in capacity planning, performance tuning and troubleshooting.

• Provisioned and managed 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.

  
  

Preferred Requirements

• 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.

• Operated AWS Aurora/RDS in production, including provisioning, backup and recovery, failover, rightsizing and cost optimization.

• Advanced experience with 1 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.

All roles with Chainlink Labs are global and remote-based. Unless otherwise stated, we ask that you try to overlap some working hours with Eastern Standard Time (EST).

We carefully review all applications and aim to provide a response to every candidate within two weeks after the job posting closes. The closing date is listed on the job advert, so we encourage you to take the time to thoughtfully prepare your application. We want to fully consider your experience and skills, and you will hear from us regarding the status of your application shortly after the closing date.

Commitment to Equal Opportunity

Chainlink Labs is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive equal consideration for employment in compliance with applicable laws, regulations, or ordinances. If you need assistance or accommodation due to a disability or special need when applying for a role or in our recruitment process, please contact us via this form.

Global Data Privacy Notice for Job Candidates and Applicants

Information collected and processed as part of your Chainlink Labs Careers profile, and any job applications you choose to submit, is subject to our Recruiting Privacy Policy. By submitting your application, you are agreeing to our use and processing of your data as required.