Senior Site Reliability Engineer - Production Platform

This is Adyen

Adyen provides payments, data, and financial products in a single solution for customers like Meta, Uber, H&M, and Microsoft - making us the financial technology platform of choice. At Adyen, everything we do is engineered for ambition. 

For our teams, we create an environment with opportunities for our people to succeed, backed by the culture and support to ensure they are enabled to truly own their careers. We are motivated individuals who tackle unique technical challenges at scale and solve them as a team. Together, we deliver innovative and ethical solutions that help businesses achieve their ambitions faster.

The SRE team - Production Platform

As part of Adyen’s globally distributed SRE team, you’ll play a critical role in ensuring the stability and reliability of our world-class financial technology platform. Your mission? To empower engineering teams to deliver their best work with confidence, knowing that their products will run seamlessly, no matter the challenges. 

Join a team that’s at the forefront of revolutionizing the way businesses operate globally. At Adyen, we empower our merchants with a cutting-edge platform that’s designed to adapt and thrive in the fast-paced world of global commerce. We don’t just meet expectations; we exceed them by integrating the best practices of Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) into everything we do. Here, data-driven decisions, intellectual curiosity, problem-solving, and openness are the keys to unlocking your potential and driving your success.

You’ll be guided by four core principles that shape our daily work, enabling you to make a real impact on a global scale:

• We embrace calculated risk 
• We use SLOs to drive platform stability and innovation
• We eliminate toil through automation
• We foster a culture of operational excellence

We’re looking for seasoned engineers to take on a pivotal technical role, where your expertise will empower our entire engineering organization. You'll be the driving force behind designing, implementing, maintaining, scaling, and troubleshooting our cutting-edge platform, which operates in containers. Your skills will not only elevate our technology but also inspire and guide others, ensuring our platform thrives in a dynamic, ever-evolving environment.

If you’re ready to be part of something transformative and push the boundaries of what’s possible, this is the opportunity for you.

Who you are

• Deep expertise in SRE practices: You are well-versed in advanced SRE methodologies, including defining and managing SLOs, optimizing error budgets, incident management, and minimizing toil. You’ve not only practiced these concepts but have also contributed to their refinement and adoption within teams.
• Expertise in container technology: You’ve managed containers at scale in production environments for at least 4 years, solving the unique challenges that come with operating containerized applications across distributed systems.
• Large-Scale Distributed Systems experience: You have a proven track record in building, operating, and troubleshooting large-scale distributed systems that span multiple data centers globally. Your experience ensures these systems are resilient, scalable, and performant.
• Ability to synthesize and simplify complexity: You are aiming for simple and elegant solutions and have mastered the ability to synthesize information in order to come up with the right requirements and specifications.
• Programming and scripting proficiency: You are skilled in one or more programming or scripting languages, such as Python, Go, Java, or bash. You leverage your coding abilities to streamline operations and automate repetitive tasks, improving overall system efficiency.
• Infrastructure as Code advocate: You have a deep understanding of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and extensive experience with configuration management and automation tools like Puppet and Ansible. You’ve implemented IaC best practices to ensure infrastructure is maintainable, versioned, and repeatable.
• Scalable and sustainable solutions mindset: You approach every challenge with a long-term perspective, ensuring the solutions you build are sustainable, scalable, and resilient. You think beyond the immediate fix and design for the future.
• Problem solver at heart: Troubleshooting isn’t just a task for you; it’s a craft. You have a relentless drive to uncover the root cause of issues and ensure they don’t recur. You bring a systematic and analytical approach to every problem you face.
• Calculated risk taker: You understand that innovation comes with risks. You’re comfortable taking calculated risks and view failures as valuable learning opportunities that pave the way for future success.
• Engineering teams as your clients: You view other engineering teams as your partners. Your mission is to empower them to build, operate, and maintain reliable, scalable services. You’re as much a mentor as you are a technical expert, guiding teams toward operational excellence.

What you’ll do

• Shape the future of our container stack: Take the lead in driving the evolution of our container stack in production. Your expertise will be pivotal in crafting solutions that will define the next generation of our platform.
• Empower engineering teams: Design and implement innovative solutions that empower our teams to build faster, more reliable, and high-performing systems and services. Your work will directly impact the success and productivity of everyone around you.
• Champion automation and scalability: Spearhead efforts to automate and scale our platform's critical components. You'll transform how we operate, ensuring our systems are efficient, resilient, and ready for the demands of tomorrow.
• Influence key architectural decisions: Be at the heart of key architectural decisions that will shape the future of our platform. Your insights and ideas will help steer the course of our technology and drive our success on a global scale.
• Master complex problem solving: Dive into the most challenging technical issues, leading the charge from initial discovery to thorough post-mortem analysis. Your problem-solving skills will be instrumental in maintaining and enhancing our platform's robustness.
• Lead continuous improvement: Together with your team, lead the ongoing enhancement of our incident management and on-call processes. You'll set new standards for excellence, ensuring we continuously learn, adapt, and improve.
• Become an observability guru: You will play a crucial role in enhancing the observability of our production systems, driving significant improvements in our alerting mechanisms and SLOs. Your efforts will ensure that we can swiftly detect and address any challenges, safeguarding the stability and performance of our operations.

Our Diversity, Equity and Inclusion commitments

Our unique approach is a product of our diverse perspectives. This diversity of backgrounds and cultures is essential in helping us maintain our momentum. Our business and technical challenges are unique, and we need as many different voices as possible to join us in solving them - voices like yours. No matter who you are or where you’re from, we welcome you to be your true self at Adyen.

Studies show that women and members of underrepresented communities apply for jobs only if they meet 100% of the qualifications. Does this sound like you? If so, Adyen encourages you to reconsider and apply. We look forward to your application!

What’s next?

Ensuring a smooth and enjoyable candidate experience is critical for us. We aim to get back to you regarding your application within 5 business days. Our interview process tends to take about 4 weeks to complete, but may fluctuate depending on the role. Learn more about our hiring process here. Don’t be afraid to let us know if you need more flexibility.

This role is based out of our Amsterdam office. We have a hybrid workplace and value in-person collaboration; we do not offer remote-only roles.