Junior Site Reliability Engineer – (Remote – United Kingdom)

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Junior Site Reliability Engineer (Remote – UK)

Yelp • London (HQ) / Remote UK Employment Type: Full-time

Job Summary

Yelp is looking for a motivated Junior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) to join their distributed UK-based team. In this role, you will help manage the scalable, self-healing, and globally distributed infrastructure that supports over 100 million monthly users. Yelp’s SRE culture is centered on automation and developer empowerment—aiming to make infrastructure management as simple as a git commit and a code review. This is an ideal role for an engineer who thrives in the “dev-ops” space and wants to work on core architecture while having the support of a mentorship-driven, collaborative engineering culture.

Key Responsibilities

  • Platform Reliability: Build and maintain tools to monitor site stability, performance, and infrastructure scalability, ensuring Yelp meets its Service Level Objectives (SLOs).

  • Developer Empowerment: Automate infrastructure to enable product teams to move faster, utilizing tools like Terraform, Puppet, and Python.

  • Incident Response: Troubleshoot site issues using industry-leading monitoring tools (Splunk, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry) and participate in a “follow-the-sun” on-call rotation.

  • Systems Development: Develop custom tooling when existing solutions fall short and contribute to open-source projects.

  • Technical Collaboration: Support product engineers in launching new features and services by providing robust, self-service infrastructure.

Required Qualifications & Skills

  • Linux Proficiency: Strong familiarity with Linux (e.g., Ubuntu); willingness to deepen your knowledge of the OS.

  • Programming Command: Proficiency in at least one modern programming language (Python, Ruby, Go, Java, or C++).

  • Cloud & Infrastructure: Hands-on experience with public cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible, or Puppet).

  • Containers & Orchestration: Practical experience with Docker and Kubernetes.

  • Foundational Tech: Solid understanding of TCP/IP, HTTP (transport/load-balancing), and DNS.

  • Communication: Exceptional ability to document processes and communicate effectively within a remote, global team.

The “Yelp Engineering” Experience

  • Autonomous Growth: You are given ownership of projects from day one.

  • Culture: A collaborative environment that features Meeting-Free Wednesdays and quarterly team offsites.

  • Continuous Learning: Regular 3-day hackathons, bi-weekly learning groups, and a budget for digital events and conferences.

Compensation & Benefits

  • Competitive Package: Salary, pension scheme, and Employee Stock Purchase Plan (ESPP).

  • Work-Life Balance: 25 days of paid holiday (rising to 29 with service) + 1 floating holiday.

  • Remote Support: £150 monthly remote working stipend.

  • Well-being: £75 monthly wellness reimbursement and a £75 caregiver reimbursement for families.

  • Healthcare: Private health insurance, including dental and vision.

Market & Industry Context: SRE at Scale

SRE roles at companies like Yelp deal with challenges rarely seen in smaller setups. Serving 100 million users per month requires a focus on High Availability (HA) and Observability.

[Image: The SRE Hierarchy of Needs: Monitoring, Incident Response, Automation, and Capacity Planning]

Modern SREs are increasingly expected to leverage AIOps (Artificial Intelligence in IT Operations). Yelp specifically notes the use of an “extensive suite of AI tooling,” which is becoming the industry standard to reduce “alert fatigue” during on-call rotations.

Career Growth & Progression Path

Yelp is known for a strong engineering ladder that emphasizes both individual technical impact and mentorship:

  1. Junior SRE: Focuses on tooling, monitoring, and learning the Yelp stack.

  2. SRE: Takes full ownership of specific services and participates more deeply in architecture design.

  3. Senior/Staff SRE: Leads large-scale infrastructure migrations, defines SRE best practices across the company, and mentors junior staff.

  4. Engineering Management: Transitioning from individual technical contribution to managing distributed SRE teams.

Interview Preparation Insights

  • The “On-Call” Mindset: You will be asked about how you handle production incidents. Focus on your troubleshooting process—how do you methodically isolate the issue using logs, metrics, and traces?

  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Be ready to explain a time you used IaC to solve a problem. Why is declarative configuration better than manual changes?

  • The “Git” Workflow: Yelp emphasizes automation. Understand why “spinning up infrastructure should be a git commit away.” How does this approach prevent configuration drift?

  • Linux/Networking Basics: Don’t skip the fundamentals. Be prepared to explain how a client request travels from a browser to a backend service.

Compliance Note

  • Northern Ireland: A Basic criminal background check via AccessNI is required.

  • Location: You must be physically located in the UK.

    This summary table outlines the core engineering culture, technical responsibilities, and benefits for the Junior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) position at Yelp, based remotely in the United Kingdom.

    Core Role Summary: Junior Site Reliability Engineer

    Category Details & Specifications
    Institution Yelp
    Location Remote (United Kingdom)
    Role Level Junior (Focus on growth and mentorship)
    Core Mission Keeping Yelp’s globally-distributed infrastructure fast, available, and scalable
    Work Environment Collaborative, meeting-free Wednesdays, quarterly offsites
    Tech Stack Linux (Ubuntu), Python, Terraform, Puppet, AWS, Kubernetes, Docker
    Monitoring Tools Splunk, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry

    Key Engineering Responsibilities

    • Infrastructure Automation: Developing self-service infrastructure via code (Git/Terraform) to empower product and development teams.

    • Reliability & Scalability: Maintaining platform Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and troubleshooting site performance using industry-leading observability tools.

    • Systems Architecture: Working across dev and systems environments to build and manage self-healing infrastructure capable of supporting over 100 million monthly users.

    • On-Call Support: Participation in a “follow-the-sun” rotation model, designed to ensure team members do not have to endure 24-hour on-call shifts.

    Benefits & Employee Support

    • Financial: Competitive salary, pension scheme, and employee stock purchase plan.

    • Wellbeing: Private health insurance (dental/vision), £75/month wellness reimbursement, and a £75/month caregiver reimbursement.

    • Remote Flexibility: £150 monthly remote work reimbursement and flexible working hours.

    • Time Off: 25 days paid holiday (rising to 29 with service) + 1 floating holiday.

    • Growth: Dedicated time for 3-day hackathons, bi-weekly learning groups, and conference opportunities.

    Diversity & Inclusion Statistics

    Yelp publicly reports on its workforce demographics to maintain transparency regarding diversity within its organization. According to Yelp’s most recent 2025 Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Report, the breakdown of their global workforce is as follows:

    • Gender: 45% of employees identify as women, 53% identify as men, and 2% identify as non-binary or choose not to disclose.

    • Race/Ethnicity (U.S. Workforce):

      • White: 56%

      • Asian: 22%

      • Hispanic/Latino: 10%

      • Black/African American: 7%

      • Two or More Races/Other: 5%

    Yelp emphasizes that they consider all qualified applicants regardless of background and are committed to maintaining an inclusive environment.

To apply for this job please visit www.yelp.careers.