Site Reliability Engineer (For Independent Contractors)

📍 Amsterdam, Netherlands

EUR 55-110 per hour

MIDDLE

✅ Hybrid ✅ On-site

✅ Contract / Freelance

Tech Stack
Tag name is followed by "@" symbol and proficiency level value. About proficiency levels:

1-2 — basic awareness. Minimal hands-on experience, and a rudimentary understanding of the technology's purpose;

3-6 — daily use. Comfortable and regular usage, capable of handling common tasks and challenges related to the technology;

7-9 — you are an expert, you can teach others, you know all the pitfalls and tricks;

10 — exceptional knowledge, comprehensive understanding, and adeptness in all aspects of the technology, including advanced problem-solving. Think twice before claiming or demanding such level.

AWS @ 3 Communication @ 6 Customer Support Debugging @ 3 Grafana @ 3 Kubernetes @ 3 Networking Observability @ 3 Prometheus @ 3 Puppet Security Terraform VictoriaMetrics @ 3

Plan and execute Kubernetes version upgrades across EKS and on-premises clusters, coordinating with internal teams to minimise disruption
Perform routine maintenance: add-on upgrades, storage and networking configuration, component upgrades for monitoring, security and other tooling
Act on cluster health issues across the fleet and proactively work on degradation signals before they become incidents

Be the first point of contact for engineering teams running workloads on BKS: triaging issues, diagnosing failures, and guiding teams to resolution
Help teams understand platform capabilities, quota management, and best practices for running reliable workloads. Evaluate quota requests and current usage requirements and weigh them against cluster capabilities.
Contribute to runbooks and FAQs so common questions are answered before they become support requests

Identify repetitive manual tasks and reduce them through scripting and automation
Flag and address technical debt that slows down operations or increases risk
Partner with the wider BKS team on tooling improvements that reduce the operational burden across the fleet

Kubernetes operational experience: node management, upgrades, debugging workloads, cluster health
Experience with managed Kubernetes (EKS or equivalent) or on-premises cluster operations
Comfortable with observability tooling: Prometheus/VictoriaMetrics, Grafana, alerting pipelines
Strong written and verbal communication: clear in tickets, runbooks, and support threads
Able to work independently, prioritise effectively, and keep commitments

Think Customer First: the engineering teams relying on BKS are your customers; their problems are your problems
Own It: take issues through to resolution, raise blockers early, and follow through without needing to be chased
Succeed Together: share knowledge, document what you learn, and make the team stronger for it
Learn Forever: whether it’s a new technology or a Booking-specific tool, knowing how to tackle something unknown by asking the right questions
Do The Right Thing: when something looks risky, an unsafe upgrade path, a coverage gap, a missed dependency, say so and help address it

A pure software development role, the focus is operational excellence and customer support, not feature building
A solo heroics role, we escalate, pair, and work in the open
A reactive-only role, proactive maintenance and toil reduction are just as important as incident response