Site Reliability Engineer (For independent contractors)

About The Team The BKS (Booking Kubernetes Service) team builds and operates the internal Kubernetes platform underpinning hundreds of engineering teams at Booking.com. We run a large fleet of EKS and on-premises clusters across multiple regions. We try to treat operations as a software problem, when something is painful, we want to automate it; when something breaks, we learn from it.

The role This is a hands-on operational SRE role focused on keeping the BKS platform healthy, up-to-date, and well-supported. You will spend most of your time on cluster maintenance, component upgrades, and helping internal engineering teams run their workloads successfully on BKS. You may also act as a consultant to product teams on Kubernetes best practices and reliability topics.

Day-to-day Responsibilities Cluster operations & maintenance

• Plan and execute Kubernetes version upgrades across EKS and on-premises clusters, coordinating with internal teams to minimise disruption
• Perform routine maintenance: add-on upgrades, storage and networking configuration, component upgrades for monitoring, security and other tooling
• Act on cluster health issues across the fleet and proactively work on degradation signals before they become incidents

Internal customer support

• Be the first point of contact for engineering teams running workloads on BKS: triaging issues, diagnosing failures, and guiding teams to resolution
• Help teams understand platform capabilities, quota management, and best practices for running reliable workloads. Evaluate quota requests and current usage requirements and weigh them against cluster capabilities.
• Contribute to runbooks and FAQs so common questions are answered before they become support requests

Toil reduction & automation

• Identify repetitive manual tasks and reduce them through scripting and automation
• Flag and address technical debt that slows down operations or increases risk
• Partner with the wider BKS team on tooling improvements that reduce the operational burden across the fleet

Required Skills

• Kubernetes operational experience: node management, upgrades, debugging workloads, cluster health
• Experience with managed Kubernetes (EKS or equivalent) or on-premises cluster operations
• Comfortable with observability tooling: Prometheus/VictoriaMetrics, Grafana, alerting pipelines
• Strong written and verbal communication: clear in tickets, runbooks, and support threads
• Able to work independently, prioritise effectively, and keep commitments

Nice to have

• Terraform for infrastructure provisioning
• Puppet or similar configuration management for on-premises environments
• AWS experience
• Experience supporting internal developer platforms or infrastructure teams

What We Expect

• Think Customer First: the engineering teams relying on BKS are your customers; their problems are your problems
• Own It: take issues through to resolution, raise blockers early, and follow through without needing to be chased
• Succeed Together: share knowledge, document what you learn, and make the team stronger for it
• Learn Forever: whether it’s a new technology or a Booking-specific tool, knowing how to tackle something unknown by asking the right questions
• Do The Right Thing: when something looks risky, an unsafe upgrade path, a coverage gap, a missed dependency, say so and help address it

What This Role Is Not

• A pure software development role, the focus is operational excellence and customer support, not feature building
• A solo heroics role, we escalate, pair, and work in the open
• A reactive-only role, proactive maintenance and toil reduction are just as important as incident response

Booking.com is an equal opportunity employer. We value diverse perspectives and are committed to building an inclusive environment where everyone can do their best work.