Site Reliability Engineer - Data Engineering

Talenza; Sydney; On-site; AUD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Talenza in Sydney, Australia seeks an experienced Site Reliability Engineer to join a high‑performing Data Platform team. You will operate a large multi-petabyte data environment, focusing on Kafka, HDFS, and in-house tooling while collaborating with engineers across disciplines.

You will own incident response, automation, and capacity planning, ensuring reliable, scalable services that power trader research and decision support. This is a hands‑on role in a production environment.

Qualifications

• Around 2-3 years' experience in an SRE, platform, infrastructure, systems or production engineering role.
• Strong Linux troubleshooting skills across processes, filesystems, networking, disk and memory pressure.
• Hands‑on operator experience with at least one of Kafka, HDFS or Kubernetes - you have deployed, configured, upgraded, tuned or supported the platform itself.
• Experience operating self‑managed infrastructure, whether bare metal, datacentre, self‑run VMs or self‑managed Kubernetes.
• Python experience for systems automation, operational tooling, health checks or deployment workflows.
• Exposure to Docker, Kubernetes, Helm and infrastructure‑focused CI/CD.
• A curious, pragmatic mindset and a genuine interest in understanding how complex systems behave under pressure.

Responsibilities

• Run, monitor and improve large-scale data platforms including Kafka, HDFS, Dremio and internally built pipelines.
• Troubleshoot real production issues across Linux, storage, networking and distributed infrastructure.
• Build automation and CI/CD capability to make deployments faster, safer and more repeatable.
• Support upgrades, capacity planning, incident response and long-term reliability improvements.
• Work closely with systems and network engineers, developers, researchers and end users to solve complex data-platform problems.
• Help evaluate and introduce new technology as the environment continues to evolve.

Skills

Linux troubleshooting

Kafka

HDFS

Kubernetes

Python

Docker

CI/CD

Terraform

Ansible

Puppet

Helm

Tools

Kafka

HDFS

Kubernetes

Docker

Helm

Ansible

Puppet

Terraform

Job description

Site Reliability Engineer - Data Platform

Sydney | Global Trading Firm

Join a global trading firm's high-performing Data Engineering team and help operate the large-scale platform that underpins trader research, simulation, reporting and decision-making.

This is a proper infrastructure role-not one for someone who has only built data pipelines on top of managed services. You'll get hands-on with the underlying platform: Kafka, HDFS, Dremio, Linux and in-house data tooling across a multi-petabyte environment processing around two million queries each day.

You'll join a small, experienced Sydney team with international engineering counterparts, giving you genuine ownership, strong mentoring and exposure to complex distributed systems at meaningful scale.

The role

• Run, monitor and improve large-scale data platforms including Kafka, HDFS, Dremio and internally built pipelines.

• Troubleshoot real production issues across Linux, storage, networking and distributed infrastructure.

• Build automation and CI/CD capability to make deployments faster, safer and more repeatable.

• Support upgrades, capacity planning, incident response and long-term reliability improvements.

• Work closely with systems and network engineers, developers, researchers and end users to solve complex data-platform problems.

• Help evaluate and introduce new technology as the environment continues to evolve.

What we're looking for

• Around 2-3 years' experience in an SRE, platform, infrastructure, systems or production engineering role.

• Strong Linux troubleshooting skills across processes, filesystems, networking, disk and memory pressure.

• Hands‑on operator experience with at least one of Kafka, HDFS or Kubernetes-you have deployed, configured, upgraded, tuned or supported the platform itself.

• Experience operating self‑managed infrastructure, whether bare metal, datacentre, self‑run VMs or self‑managed Kubernetes.

• Python experience for systems automation, operational tooling, health checks or deployment workflows.

• Exposure to Docker, Kubernetes, Helm and infrastructure‑focused CI/CD.

• A curious, pragmatic mindset and a genuine interest in understanding how complex systems behave under pressure.

Experience with Dremio, Presto, Airflow, Prefect, Ansible, Puppet, Terraform or cloud platforms would be beneficial, but it is the operational mindset and underlying Linux/infrastructure depth that matter most.

This is a standout opportunity for an engineer who wants to move beyond managed services, get close to the underlying technology and build a career operating high‑scale, business‑critical systems.