Senior SRE Engineer (Data Infrastructure) at a large product IT company — remote from Russia

About the company

A large product IT company, a leader in its segment of online services.

Tens of millions of users per month, 1,000+ employees.

Strong engineering culture, little bureaucracy, lots of autonomy.

What you will do

We are looking for an SRE to join the team that operates data storage and processing systems and is responsible for their availability, upgrades and recovery. The first focus is on part of the data platform: Hadoop and S3 storage, Kafka, ZooKeeper, Hive Metastore, Trino/Presto. We will discuss the scope of responsibility at the start, taking into account your experience and interests.

Possible tasks:

• Be responsible for the stable operation of the data platform: find the causes of failures, performance drops and replication issues.
• Build fault tolerance: configure failover, make sure backups are complete, automate recovery and verify that afterwards the data is intact and consumer services work.
• Move maintenance and rollout of components into code: IaC, CI/CD, change review.
• Maintain SLOs, monitoring, documentation and capacity planning.
• Together with InfoSec and adjacent teams, upgrade components, narrow access, segment the network and rotate secrets.
• Be on call and review incidents; take part in DR drills with site failure and data corruption, measure real RTO and RPO.
• Take components into your area of responsibility from their current owners, move them to another Russian cloud, onboard a partner engineer and review colleagues' work.

Stack

Hadoop, S3, Kafka, ZooKeeper, Hive Metastore, Trino/Presto, PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, MySQL, Kubernetes, Terraform, SaltStack, Prometheus/VictoriaMetrics, Grafana, Yandex Cloud, VK Cloud.

What matters

• 4+ years of experience operating data infrastructure with on-call duty and handling incidents independently.
• Experience independently supporting at least one data storage or processing system in production: upgrades, diagnostics, recovery.
• Understanding of the weak points of replication and backups; hands-on experience restoring data with verification of integrity and consumer operation.
• Knowledge of Linux at diagnostic level: file systems, disk I/O, networking, DNS, TLS.
• Automation and IaC skills: Bash, Python, Git, CI/CD, Terraform, configuration management.
• Understanding of monitoring principles: metrics, logs, alerts (Prometheus/Grafana or similar).
• Experience making safe changes in production: a well-thought-out order of steps, stop points and rollback, testing partial failures, idempotent automation.
• An approach to access to backups and keys that accounts for least privilege and possible compromise.
• Autonomy: you drive tasks and projects to results yourself, flag risks early and can work in close collaboration with engineering and InfoSec.
• Ability to work with AI agents in a way where you yourself check the resulting code, permissions and consequences of changes.

Nice to have

• Deep expertise in one or more data storage and processing systems: Kafka, Hadoop, Trino/Presto, ClickHouse, PostgreSQL or MySQL.
• Experience with stateful services in Kubernetes: volumes, secrets, configs, diagnostics.
• Experience with S3 storage, ZooKeeper, Hive Metastore, Elasticsearch.
• Experience migrating data systems between clouds.

Terms

• Fully remote with flexible hours: offices in three Russian cities are open to everyone who wishes.
• Official employment under the Russian Labor Code.
• Transparent processes: performance review twice a year, a clear engineering track, a mentor at the start, an individual development plan.
• Health insurance from day one: dentistry, hospitalization, travel insurance abroad.
• 31 days of vacation + 5 days off + 10 sick days.
• Budget for learning, fitness and mental health.
• Real influence on processes and architecture: lots of own decisions, Disaster Recovery drills, high ownership.

Scale: 10+ Kubernetes clusters, hundreds of DB clusters, several PB of data, GPU capacity.