Site Reliability Engineer III

ROLE PURPOSE

Build the platforms that keep KFC restaurant technology reliable, observable, and secure, from cloud services to the Kubernetes clusters, point-of-sale devices, and network equipment in thousands of restaurants. This is a generalist engineering role. You will work across software, edge, cloud, observability, and security engineering, and you will own defined workstreams from design through production. Our guiding principle is that the platform should make safe and secure both easy and default. We solve problems once, in the platform, so they don't become recurring manual work for us or for the teams we support. Where we can, systems should detect and recover from common failures on their own. Self-healing is a platform default, not an afterthought.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Software Engineering & Platform Automation

• Design, build, and maintain the platform's core software: internal APIs (e.g., a Go platform gateway), a self-service web portal (e.g., React), and durable workflow automation (e.g., Temporal) that turn multi-step operational tasks into safe, repeatable, auditable self-service actions for engineering and support teams.

• Participate in the full software development lifecycle: contribute design and architectural input, implement, test, review, deploy, and operate what you build. Write production-quality code with tests, code review, and CI pipelines, and treat internal tools as products with real users.

• Integrate the platform with the systems around it: mobile device management (MDM) platforms, CMDBs and network sources of truth (e.g., Nautobot), edge management platforms, cloud provider and vendor APIs, and open-source libraries and tools, so that data and actions flow between systems instead of between people.

Edge & On-Premises Platform Engineering

• Treat the restaurant fleet as a platform problem: build and extend the systems that provision, configure, update, and retire edge Kubernetes clusters, POS-adjacent devices, and network equipment at fleet scale.

• Build and maintain immutable, versioned OS and installer images, and the pipelines that build, test, and publish them.

• Build and extend safe rollout mechanisms (staged and progressive rollouts, health checks, automatic rollback) so that fleet changes are low-risk by default.

• Build and extend device provisioning and identity (e.g., zero-touch enrollment, hardware-backed attestation) that removes hands-on setup from restaurants and field teams.

• Build self-healing behavior into edge systems, such as reconciliation to a declared state, automated recovery of failed nodes and services, and safe retries, so that common failures in restaurants are resolved without a site visit or manual intervention.

• Use lab and virtualized test environments to validate platform changes before they reach restaurants.

Cloud Infrastructure Engineering

• Provision and change AWS and Azure infrastructure with infrastructure as code (OpenTofu/Terraform, Terragrunt), including networking, DNS, identity and access, virtual machines, and managed services.

• Operate Kubernetes clusters (EKS/AKS) and deploy through GitOps (Helm, ArgoCD) and GitLab CI.

Observability Engineering

• Build and maintain telemetry pipelines, instrumentation, and data stores for metrics, logs, traces, and events, using tools such as OpenTelemetry, ClickHouse, Datadog, and Zabbix, at a scale of thousands of restaurants and devices.

• Make observability part of the platform: services, devices, and network equipment should be monitored by default when they are deployed or enrolled, not wired up by hand afterward.

• Connect detection to automated remediation, so that known failure modes trigger a safe, auditable fix and people are engaged only when automation can't resolve the issue.

• Equip Service Desk and Incident Management teams with effective tools to operate the technology: clear service health signals, context-rich alerts, and self-service diagnostics. Partner with them to understand what they need, and build dashboards and alerts where those are the right tools.

Security Engineering

• Work with security teams as a proactive partner. Find and fix vulnerabilities in our applications, container images, and infrastructure.

• Build secure defaults into the platform: least-privilege access, secrets management, TLS and certificate management, and hardened images.

Operations & Escalated Support

• Deploy applications and troubleshoot escalated, multi-layer technical issues using logs, metrics, traces, and system data. Lead root cause analysis and carry corrective actions through to completion.

• Participate in an on-call rotation alongside Incident Management and Service Desk.

• Turn recurring support work into platform improvements, ideally self-healing automation, and write the runbooks, architecture notes, and decision records that let others support what you build.

QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.

• Typically 2+ years of hands-on experience in software engineering, site reliability engineering, DevOps, platform or infrastructure engineering, or a related technical role.

• Proven ability to own a technical problem end to end: break down an ambiguous request, plan the work, deliver it, and know when to ask for help on high-risk or unfamiliar decisions.

• Experience troubleshooting production systems across multiple layers (application, OS, network, cloud).

TECHNICAL KNOWLEDGE & SKILLS EXPECTED

• Comfortable working on the command line in Linux (or macOS/WSL) and with Git-based workflows.

• Programming or scripting experience in at least one language such as Go, Python, TypeScript, or Bash, and experience building against or exposing REST APIs.

• Working knowledge of networking fundamentals: DNS, TCP/IP, routing, VLANs, load balancing, and TLS/certificates.

• Experience with at least one major cloud platform (AWS or Azure). Deep specialization in a single cloud is not required.

• Familiarity with containers and Kubernetes.

• Familiarity with infrastructure as code and CI/CD.

• Security-minded engineering habits: least privilege, secrets hygiene, and responding to vulnerability findings.

• Effective use of AI-assisted development tools, with the judgment to verify their output.

A plus. We don't expect anyone to know all of these, and we will help you grow in the areas that are new to you.

• Observability tooling: OpenTelemetry, Datadog, Zabbix, ClickHouse, Prometheus/Grafana.

• GitOps and orchestration: ArgoCD, Helm, Temporal.

• Edge and bare-metal: edge Kubernetes distributions (e.g., Spectro Cloud Palette/Kairos), PXE, out-of-band management, immutable OS images (e.g., NixOS).

• Network equipment configuration (e.g., Aruba switches) and network source-of-truth tools (e.g., Nautobot).

• Mobile device management (MDM) platforms.

• Front-end development (React) or API design.

• Incident and service management tools such as Incident.io, ServiceNow, or Jira.

Salary Range: $106,600 - $133,200

Benefits: Employees (and their eligible family members) may enroll in the following types of insurance coverage: medical, dental, vision, legal, and accidental death and dismemberment, as well as FSA/HSA (depending on enrolled medical plan). Yum! also provides short-term disability, long-term disability, and life insurance. Employees may enroll in our 401(k) plan. Yum! provides 4 weeks of vacation, paid sick leave, 10 paid holidays, a floating day off, half day Fridays year-round and 2 paid days for volunteer time each calendar year. To learn more about working at Yum! -Click here.

At Yum!, one of our core values is to Believe in ALL People. This means seeing the value in everyone and unlocking their full potential to be their best self. YUM! Brands, Inc. (including its subsidiaries Yum Restaurant Services Group, LLC (“YRSG”) and Yum Connect, LLC (“Yum Digital and Technology”)(collectively, “Yum”) is proud to be an equal opportunity employer and is committed to equity, inclusion, and belonging for all dimensions of diversity. We do not discriminate based on race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, veteran status, disability status, age, or any other protected characteristic. Yum! is committed to working with and providing reasonable accommodation to applicants with disabilities or special needs.

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