Site Reliability Engineer (For independent contractors)

About the role

We are looking for a Site Reliability Engineer II to join the Service Interoperability & API Infrastructure (SIAI) team at Booking.com. In this role, you will treat operations as a software problem and help improve the reliability, availability, performance, scalability, latency, observability, and efficiency of critical platform services. You will build and operate systems that reduce manual effort through automation and strengthen the reliability of production systems at scale.

As an SRE II, you will be responsible for implementing technical solutions based on business requirements, estimating the effort and impact of your work, and delivering high-quality engineering outcomes. You will work primarily within your team while collaborating with partner teams when needed, and you will actively participate in incident response for issues affecting your services.

About the team

SIAI is the team responsible for Service Interoperability and API Infrastructure. The team operates at the heart of Booking.com’s platform connectivity landscape and works on the systems, standards, and operating models that make service-to-service and API traffic easier to build, govern, discover, and run reliably.

Today, that includes work across API gateways, service mesh, API cataloging, and related platform foundations. SIAI’s north star includes a control surface based on Kubernetes Gateway API, Istio as the underlying mesh fabric, gateway as the primary internal runtime, Apigee at the partner and public edge, and API Hub as the system of record for APIs.

This is a hands-on engineering role for someone who enjoys owning production systems end to end, improving platform health, reducing toil, and helping teams move faster with safer defaults and better operational tooling.

What you will do

- Design, build, deploy, and operate software and automation that improve the reliability and efficiency of SIAI-owned systems and services.

- Own services end to end, including deployment, production operations, health monitoring, metrics, and service documentation such as runbooks and operational guides.

- Improve observability, monitoring, alerting, and capacity awareness for critical production systems and supporting infrastructure.

- Participate in incident response, mitigate customer impact within SLA, contribute to postmortems, and drive long-term fixes through root cause analysis.

- Work with engineers, product stakeholders, and partner teams to design technical solutions that meet current needs and remain adaptable for future enhancements.

- Reduce operational toil and technical debt through automation, simplification, scaling improvements, and better engineering workflows.

- Contribute to a team culture built around clear ownership, transparent decision-making, predictable delivery, and shared operational standards.

- Help improve the platform foundations behind API and service interoperability, including areas such as gateway runtime, service mesh, API catalog integration, and -production readiness practices.

Required skills

• Core engineering skills

  
  

• Strong software engineering fundamentals, including the ability to build maintainable, readable, and reusable code.

  
  

• Experience designing and implementing technical solutions in distributed systems or platform environments.

  
  

• Ability to own services end to end, from design and deployment to steady-state operations in production.

  
  

• Good troubleshooting and debugging skills across applications, infrastructure, and production environments.

  
  

• Reliability and operations skills

  
  

• Practical experience operating production services with a focus on reliability, availability, scalability, performance, and efficiency.

  
  

• Experience with observability, including metrics, alerting, monitoring, and capacity awareness.

  
  

• Experience participating in incident response, root cause analysis, and post-incident follow-up.

  
  

• Strong bias for automation, toil reduction, and continuous improvement.

  
  

• Ability to improve operational workflows, documentation, runbooks, and service health practices.

  
  

• Platform and infrastructure skills

  
  

• Working knowledge of cloud-native or platform infrastructure concepts.

  
  

• Familiarity with Kubernetes, service mesh, gateway, or networking concepts is valuable.

  
  

• Exposure to platform engineering, internal developer platforms, or shared infrastructure services is beneficial.

  
  

• Collaboration and communication skills

  
  

• Clear written and verbal communication skills.

  
  

• Ability to work effectively with engineers, stakeholders, and cross-functional partners.

  
  

• Collaborative mindset with the ability to contribute within a team and occasionally across partner teams.

  
  

• Ability to balance engineering quality, delivery needs, and operational responsibility.

Experience expected

• Professional experience in site reliability engineering, software engineering, production engineering with 3-5 years experience.

Nice to have

• Experience with Kubernetes, service mesh, or platform networking concepts.

  
  

• Experience with API gateways, API platforms, or API lifecycle tooling such as gateway runtimes, specs, or catalogs.

  
  

• Exposure to API governance, spec-first development flows, or platform standards work.

  
  

• Experience improving internal developer platforms or reliability workflows for other engineering teams.