The Role
Lead reliability, availability, scalability, and operational excellence for a global payment platform. Own incident response, on-call operations, observability, SLOs, database high availability, disaster recovery, AWS cost optimization, infrastructure automation, security, and compliance. Diagnose complex production issues across Kubernetes, databases, Kafka, and cloud infrastructure. Mentor engineers, reduce operational toil, improve resilience, and coordinate critical incident response across global teams.
Summary Generated by Built In
We are seeking a Senior Site Reliability Engineer (8+ years of experience) to drive the reliability, availability, scalability, and operational excellence of our global payment platform. You will take end-to-end ownership of production observability, incident response, service-level management, and cloud infrastructure reliability across mission-critical payment systems spanning Europe and Asia.
Key Responsibilities
- Incident Management & On-Call: Participate in a follow-the-sun production on-call rotation as a senior incident responder. Lead incident management during SEV1/SEV2 events to optimise MTTR and operational effectiveness.
- Production Operations: Diagnose, triage, mitigate, and coordinate the resolution of complex production incidents across payment services, Kubernetes (EKS) platforms, databases, Kafka pipelines, and cloud infrastructure.
- Database HA & Disaster Recovery: Own database high availability and disaster recovery end-to-end — Aurora/RDS Multi-AZ, replication, automated backups, PITR, and regular, documented restore drills so recovery never depends on one person.
- SLO & Reliability Engineering: Define, implement, and maintain SLOs, SLIs, error budgets, alerting standards, and operational readiness processes across distributed services. Drive the shift from log-count alerting to symptom- and metric-based alerting.
- Cost Optimisation: Own AWS cost efficiency across our multi-account environment — right-sizing, Savings Plans/RI coverage, data transfer, and storage lifecycle.
- Continuous Optimisation: Drive systemic reliability improvements through infrastructure automation, observability enhancement, capacity planning, performance tuning, and post-incident root-cause analysis (RCA).
- Security & Compliance: Partner with global engineering teams to strengthen architectural resilience, security posture, and operational maturity in PCI-DSS-regulated payment environments.
- Technical Leadership: Mentor engineers, eliminate operational toil through automation, and influence engineering teams to adopt resilience-by-design practices.
Requirements
Qualifications & Requirements
- Experience: 8+ years of hands-on experience in Site Reliability Engineering, Platform Engineering, DevOps, or Cloud Infrastructure roles supporting high-availability, mission-critical production systems.
- Core Technical Stack: Strong expertise in AWS (multi-account, EKS), Kubernetes, Terraform, PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, Linux, networking, and modern observability platforms (e.g., Coralogix, PagerDuty, Prometheus, Grafana).
- Database HA & DR: Proven experience with database high availability and disaster recovery — replication, failover, backup strategies, and hands-on restore operations.
- Distributed Systems Mastery: Deep understanding of distributed systems architecture, high availability, disaster recovery, capacity planning, and microservices orchestration.
- SRE Methodology: Deep knowledge of core SRE principles, including SLO/SLI design, error budget management, alert governance, and toil reduction.
- Location & Communication: Based in Hong Kong or Shenzhen. Excellent command of English (written and spoken) to lead cross-functional incident responses and collaborate seamlessly with global teams; Mandarin required for local collaboration.
Nice to Have
- Experience in payment, banking, fintech, or other highly regulated environments with strict PCI-DSS, security, and uptime standards.
- Experience with AI-assisted operations (AI agents for incident diagnosis, runbook automation).
Leadership & Operational Excellence
- Ownership: Demonstrates strong end-to-end accountability for service reliability and customer impact under high pressure.
- Structured Problem Solving: Applies a systematic and data-driven approach to troubleshooting, telemetry analysis, and incident resolution in complex distributed environments.
- Crisis Management: Proven ability to command cross-functional incident response efforts, align stakeholders, and maintain clear communication during critical outages.
- Engineering Culture: Champions a blameless post-incident culture, operational readiness, continuous learning, and technical mentorship.
Benefits
- Competitive package
- A dynamic and innovative team
- Collaborative, inclusive working environment where your contributions are recognized
Skills Required
- 8+ years of hands-on experience in Site Reliability Engineering, Platform Engineering, DevOps, or Cloud Infrastructure roles
- Experience supporting high-availability, mission-critical production systems
- Strong expertise in AWS, including multi-account environments and EKS
- Strong expertise in Kubernetes, Terraform, PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, Linux, and networking
- Experience with modern observability platforms such as Coralogix, PagerDuty, Prometheus, or Grafana
- Proven database high availability and disaster recovery experience, including replication, failover, backups, and restore operations
- Deep understanding of distributed systems, high availability, disaster recovery, capacity planning, and microservices orchestration
- Deep knowledge of SRE principles, including SLO and SLI design, error budgets, alert governance, and toil reduction
- Based in Hong Kong or Shenzhen
- Excellent written and spoken English
- Mandarin language proficiency
- Experience in payment, banking, fintech, or other highly regulated environments
- Experience with PCI-DSS, security, and uptime standards
- Experience with AI-assisted operations, incident diagnosis, or runbook automation
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The Company
What We Do
Kody is on a mission to make in-person payment acceptance easy. Today, paying in person presents common problems for businesses, such as high costs, long queues, and limited choice of payment methods. Kody fully integrates the payment ecosystem. This way, businesses can offer customers more control over their payment choices to make transactions quicker and simpler. Founded by a small group of final-year high school students and launched in July 2022, 24-year-old founder Yoyo Chang (CEO) studied at the University of Cambridge & York whilst raising US$10M. Today, Kody's platform is growing to connect millions of end-users with venues all over the world.
