Site Reliability Engineer, Associate

About this role

We’re looking for an SRE with strong Kafka experience and a deep understanding of SRE best practices. You’ll combine handson technical improvements with the ability to delegate work effectively to Event Bus developers.

You’ll collaborate closely with the Event Bus, Kafka, Telemetry, and Incident Response teams, while also working independently to improve monitoring, reduce noise, strengthen alerting, and track remediation progress.

This role sits at the centre of a global platform used by hundreds of developers and joins a fast-growing, experienced SRE group based in Edinburgh.

The Aladdin Event Bus is built on Kafka and enables teams to publish and subscribe to distributed events in near real time. As part of the Aladdin Graph group—a core Platform Engineering function—the Event Bus team supports developers across the firm in designing, building, and operating event driven and APIbased systems.

Event Bus is now a critical dependency for key applications, including our release system and API infrastructure. This drives a high bar for availability, incident responsiveness, and operational excellence. The SRE function supports this by improving observability, streamlining incident processes, and identifying gaps that meaningfully improve platform reliability.

As the SRE for Event Bus, you will drive stability, resiliency, and observability through:

• Staying informed on all Event Bus incidents, including impact, root cause, detection, and ongoing remediation
• Responding to incidents calmly and efficiently, communicating clearly with reporters and partner teams, and recommending remediations based on urgency and impact
• Proposing improvements informed by prior incidents, potential risks, and industry standards—e.g., new metrics, SLOs, fallback mechanisms
• Leading incident retrospectives and sharing insights with the wider team
• Creating and distributing postmortems for high impact operational events
• Collaborating with developers to write, maintain, and promote runbooks and playbooks
• Improving alert quality and reducing alert fatigue by tuning signaltonoise ratios
• Designing and implementing automated recovery solutions for known issues
• Building a roadmap toward 24/7 availability, rapid failover recovery, self detection, and automated resolution of common issues
• Helping Event Bus users diagnose issues with their own producers and consumers

• 3+ years in an SRE role, including experience with defining and managing SLOs
• Strong understanding of SRE principles (Golden Signals, error budgets, synthetic monitoring, signaltonoise optimisation)
• Extensive handson experience with Kafka
• Experience using monitoring tools (Grafana and Splunk preferred), including building dashboards, alerts, and reports

• Java Developer
  
  Experience:
  
  Experience with Java or another object oriented language
• CI/CD & Release Management:
  Experience managing pipelines using Azure Dev Ops or other Gitbased tools
• Cloud
  
  Experience:
  
  Practical experience with at least one public cloud provider, preferably Azure or AWS
• Agile Development:
  Familiarity with agile ways of working, sprint ceremonies, and backlog planning
• Scripting & Automation:
  Proficiency in Python or Golang for automating operational tasks
• Monitoring & Observability:
  Strong understanding of logging, monitoring, and observability practices, including writing integration scripts
• Collaboration & Communication:
  Strong crossteam collaboration skills and excellent written and verbal communication

To help you stay energized, engaged and inspired, we offer a wide range of employee benefits including: retirement investment and tools designed to help you in building a sound financial future; access to education reimbursement; comprehensive resources to support your physical health and emotional well-being; family support programs; and Flexible Time Off (FTO) so you can relax, recharge and be there for the people you care about.

Black Rock’s hybrid work model is designed to enable a culture of collaboration and apprenticeship that enriches the experience of our employees, while supporting flexibility for all. Employees…