Site Reliability Engineer, Big Data (Remote, International)

DescriptionWebMD and its affiliates is an Equal Opportunity/Affirmative Action employer and does not discriminate on the basis of race, ancestry, color, religion, sex, gender, age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, medical condition, disability, veterans status, or any other basis protected by law.Build streaming and storage systems at PulsePointPulsePoint processes billions of events daily through Kafka, Hadoop HDFS and Ceph. Our Data Platform team maintains these systems across hybrid infrastructure: bare-metal on-prem, cloud, and the integration between them. You own the lifecycle from architecture through deployment to capacity planning and incident response.What you'll work onKafka architecture, topic design, governance, partition strategy, throughput and latency optimization.Ceph operations, pool design, placement optimization, capacity planning.Operational automation, reduce manual work, faster incident response, preventive systems.SQL Server backup and recovery pipelines, basic cluster support.Data team tooling with self-service capabilities and observability.TechnologyApache Kafka for messaging layerHadoop and Ceph as distributed storage layerSQL Server backup and recoveryTerraform, Ansible, Puppet, ArgoCD for operational automationPrometheus, Grafana, Icinga and PagerDuty as observability layerBare-metal servers and hybrid cloud/on-prem infrastructureWhat matters: understand distributed systems, failure recovery, and operational patterns at scale. Apache Kafka and Ceph expertise is most valuable.Who we're looking forYou've operated data infrastructure at petabyte scale or billions of events/day. You understand replication failures, consistency tradeoffs, and cost-optimization of large systems. You automate before troubleshooting. You take ownership across system layers, not just one component. You simplify complex systems.Requirements:5+ years operating distributed systems at scale in productionDeep expertise in Kafka, Ceph, or similar distributed infrastructureProven ability to design for scale and reliabilityExperience mentoring engineers and making technical decisionsWillingness to work 9am-6pm ET U.S. hoursNice-to-haves:Multi-region replication and disaster recoveryCost optimization at infrastructure scaleHybrid on-prem/cloud operationsWhy this roleThis is not a ticket-driven operational role.You'll help define platform architecture, influence engineering standards and work on infrastructure that supports multiple engineering organizations.The engineer joining this role is expected to become a key technical contributor shaping the future of the platform.You can work fully remotely and get the opportunity to work on large-scale infrastructure and distributed systems challenges.Hiring processWe try to keep the process focused and practical.Introductory conversation (~60m)Learn about your background and discuss the role.Technical discussion (~60m)Deep dive into systems engineering, Kubernetes and operational experience.Architecture discussion (~60m)Explore platform design, distributed systems and technical decision-making.Leadership conversation (~30m)Meet engineering leadership and discuss team, strategy and long-term direction.