Site Reliability Engineer II

KFC•Irvine, CA

4d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Digital Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) team supports one of the fastest-growing lines of business at one of the hottest Quick Service Restaurants as part of the largest group of restaurants in the world. We support both internal and external customers by ensuring that our digital systems, including mobile and web ordering, operate as smoothly and seamlessly as possible. As part of the SRE team, Site Reliability Engineers work closely with Software Developers, Platform Engineering teams, and other stakeholders to help ensure our digital systems are available and performing as expected. Our goal is to deploy and maintain observability, reduce toil through automation, identify and remediate defects, and continuously improve both the environment and our own capabilities. We also ensure we have, or build, the tools necessary to identify root causes and answer questions we had not yet anticipated. Many team members are remote/distributed across the US, while others reside near our Irvine campus Headquarters, and come into the office on a hybrid schedule. We’re looking for someone who can own a problem from start to finish — someone who is comfortable digging into the code, identifying the issue, and proposing a fix. This person will become a subject matter expert within the Taco Bell Digital space. Fundamentally, we’re looking for someone who lives and breathes observability and automation, and who is passionate about continuously raising the bar. We want someone who listens well, communicates clearly and effectively, drives alignment, and helps engineering teams improve their processes. As a fierce advocate for the customer, your job would take you into troubleshooting issues and incidents, building out new dashboards and alerts, finding out the answers to help us get to the root cause of problems, and ultimately fixing them for good.

Requirements

Bachelor’s degree in computer science, engineering, OR a related field, OR equivalent work experience.
At least 2+ years of experience in the SRE space, with a focus on observability and automation
Familiarity with SRE core principles (e.g. SLO, SLA, SLI, Error Budget, etc.)
Hands-on experience creating monitors, dashboards, SLOs, and other observability capabilities
Experience with logging solutions or platforms such as DataDog, CloudWatch log insights, etc.
Understanding of incident management practices, including leading bridge calls, conducting RCAs, and facilitating postmortems
Familiarity with modern observability practices and tools, such as distributed tracing, APM, OpenTelemetry, and RUM
Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively in a fast-paced environment as a member of a team
A fundamentally complete understanding of Observability principles (not just monitoring) + experience using tools like DataDog, Lumigo, CloudWatch, Incident.io, PagerDuty or similar
General level understanding of Agile methods such as Kanban, Scrum, etc.
Advanced troubleshooting skills
A curious mindset and the desire to always keep learning
Proactive self-starter capable of operating autonomously
Ability to participate in an on-call rotation
Proficiency with SQL (intermediate)
Intermediate understanding of JavaScript, Python, Go, or TypeScript
Fundamental knowledge of AWS services commonly used in serverless and cloud-native environments, including Lambda, API Gateway, Fargate, S3, DynamoDB, and EventBridge.

Nice To Haves

Skills surrounding software development (Git, CI/CD, reading and writing code) - preferably in JavaScript/TypeScript and/or Python and with tools like VS Code, Gitlab CI/CD or GitHub Actions
Experience with building automations for internal business processes, including AI-embedded workflows
Comfort and familiarity with common Unix-like shells (bash, zsh, etc)
Experience with Retool
Experience with data and observability platforms: FullStory, Amplitude, Embrace
Familiarity with AI agentic tools like Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, etc.
Prior use of issue tracking systems such as Jira
High proficiency with AWS serverless services, including Lambda, API Gateway, Fargate, S3, DynamoDB, and EventBridge.
Experience with Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform, Pulumi, or CloudFormation
Knowledge of Akamai tools, processes, and SOCC engagement
Proficiency with deploying AI via AWS Bedrock or Agentcore

Responsibilities

Create, update, or automate internal business processes or tools to reduce toil and improve team productivity.
Understand and monitor the Taco Bell Digital ecosystem for performance, availability, and accuracy of transactional data.
Communicate and collaborate with both technical and non-technical stakeholders on issues, upcoming changes, and updates to system health.
Perform final validation tests on various mobile and web-based applications, reporting on, and offering feedback on areas for improvement.
Build expertise in serverless infrastructure and initiatives while also learning aspects of modern SRE practices and terms, such as SLIs, SLOs, Observability, toil, and incident response with blameless postmortems.
Work with and adopt Agile practices while participating in a 24/7 on-call rotation.
Collaborate within the team and with cross-functional partners on high-impact business issues that affect revenue and brand reputation.

Benefits

Hybrid work schedule
Year-round flex day Friday (half day)
Onsite childcare through Bright Horizons
Onsite dining center and game room
Onsite dry cleaning, laundry services, carwash
Onsite gym with fitness classes and personal trainer sessions
Up to 4 weeks of vacation per year plus holidays and time off for volunteering
Tuition reimbursement and education benefits
Generous parental leave for all new parents and adoption assistance program
401(k) with a 6% matching contribution from Yum! Brands with immediate vesting
Comprehensive medical & dental including prescription drug benefits and 100% preventive care
Discounts, free food, swag