Senior Site Reliability Engineer - Persistence

Information about the position 

As a Senior Site Reliability Engineer II on the Kafka team, you'll build and operate the software and infrastructure behind one of Vinted's busiest platforms. The Kafka platform spans multiple data centers and regions across the EU and US, 1000+ Kafka brokers across multiple clusters.

You'll develop Kafka as a managed service, automation and client libraries, primarily using Go, Ruby and Java. You'll take ownership of solutions throughout their lifecycle: from technical design and implementation to deployment and production operation, and help shape the team's technical direction.

This role balances systems design, backend development, infrastructure setup maintenance, and operations. It suits an experienced, hands-on engineer who wants to work on large-scale infrastructure.

In this position, you’ll 

• Design and develop managed services and automation for the Kafka platform.
• Build and operate reliable, scalable services on both bare metal and Kubernetes.
• Lead technical initiatives from design to production, solving complex software and infrastructure problems along the way.
• Lead high-impact, complex, multi-datacenter projects (e.g., cross-region replication topologies, storage lifecycle management).
• Work with Compute/Kubernetes, Production Engineering, Hardware Operations, and Product teams to deliver seamless Kafka APIs and client integrations.
• Partner closely with the Staff Engineer and Engineering Manager to define the architectural roadmap for our infrastructure across multiple continents.
• Define and own SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets for our Kafka fleet, while overseeing the health, performance, and maintenance of our clusters.
• Tackle the realities of running high-throughput, multi-datacenter infrastructure - optimizing systems for resilience, low latency, and efficient resource utilization.
• Participate in the on-call rotation, currently once every five to seven weeks.
• Key Tech Stack: Storage: Ceph (RGW, RADOS) (tiered storage) with S3 API, Kubernetes persistent volumes, physical disks; Languages & Services: Go, Ruby, Java; Platform & Infra: Bare-metal Linux, Kubernetes, Docker, ArgoCD, Chef; Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Kibana, Datadog.

About you 

• Have strong backend software engineering and system design skills, ideally with production experience in Go; experience with other backend languages is also welcome.
• Have hands-on experience deploying, operating, and troubleshooting services on bare metal and Kubernetes.
• Designed and maintained distributed systems throughout their production lifecycle.
• Understand reliability, scalability, monitoring, safe deployments, and failure recovery.
• Have infrastructure operations or site reliability experience, or are motivated to develop these skills and participate in on-call.
• Communicate technical decisions clearly, collaborate effectively across teams, and have excellent written and spoken English.

Work perks 

• The opportunity to benefit from our share options programme
• 25 working days of holiday
• Access to all the tools & tech needed for work
• Home office support: we provide IT workstation equipment and a personal budget of up to €540 for home workplace furniture
• Private health insurance
• Confidential Employee Assistance Program (EAP) for you and your family
• Frequent team-building events
• A personal monthly budget for shopping on Vinted
• A dog-friendly office
• In Vilnius office: Gym & in-house meals at friendly prices
• In Kaunas office: a monthly lunch allowance, and a once-a-week provided in-house lunch and breakfast

Working at Vinted 

Workation policy

Better balance holidays with workdays by working remotely! Up to 90 days per year in the EU, of these, 21 days can be spent globally. For non-EU citizens, it's 21 days worldwide. This can be combined with time off for vacation or personal time.

Individual learning budget

Each year, you’ll be given a learning budget (starting at €3,000), and a total of up to 10 working days over a 2-year period to support your personal and professional development.

Hybrid work

Our hybrid model, with 2 recommended office days a week, gives you and your team the flexibility to decide if and when you want to work from home, and when to catch up in person.

Equal opportunity

We welcome applications from everybody, regardless of your background, identity, or life experiences. Job openings come with guides, not checklists. If you’re excited about a role, but don’t identify with every point in the ‘About you’ section, apply anyway – you might still be the perfect match!

The gross monthly salary range for this position is: 7158 - 9683 EUR