Site Reliability Engineer (For independent contractors)

Site Reliability Engineer for Booking NL (ADS), based in Amsterdam, 40 hours per week. The role is for an independent contractor (ZZP) with a payrate range of €60-111 per hour. The assignment starts on November 5, 2026 and ends on November 4, 2027 (1 year timeline). The position is remote; nearshore candidates are welcome, but full overlap with Netherlands business hours is required. The hiring is for staff augmentation to accelerate a strategic shift in how ADS runs its managed data services.

They are moving DynamoDB from a decentralised model (customer teams run everything in their own AWS accounts; the platform team only ships Terraform modules) into a Governed operating model where NoSQL has an operating role in the customer account via cross-account IAM, builds a control plane for the fleet, and offers a self-service surface. The same pattern will later extend to the rest of the ADS portfolio. The role is a hands-on platform engineer, not a traditional ops SRE.

The engineer owns production systems, understands how they behave at scale, automates operational work, and improves the platform rather than operates it ticket by ticket.

Responsibilities include: designing, building, and operating highly available NoSQL infrastructure and platform services, primarily around DynamoDB; building Governed-model capabilities such as cross-account IAM roles, module rollout tooling, live estate inventory, SOx evidence collection, and break-glass access; developing reusable Terraform modules and software-engineering-grade automation; operating workloads across many AWS accounts (one per consumer team) and environments; working with AWS primitives (IAM, VPC, networking, EC2, KMS, CloudWatch, multi-account org tooling); automating provisioning, configuration, upgrades, remediation, and routine operational tasks (a recent module upgrade cost roughly 8.5 person-days across 15 consumer teams for a 1-2 day code change; the job is to make that number collapse); improving observability, alerting, incident response, SLOs, and operational readiness; diagnosing production issues across applications, databases, Linux, networking, and AWS; contributing to migrations and modernisation; building self-service capabilities and standardised interfaces for internal engineering teams consuming NoSQL services; and participating in design, implementation, code review, testing, deployment, and production support.

The must-have requirements are: 3 to 5 years of production experience building or running distributed systems at meaningful scale; strong AWS (IAM, VPC and networking, EC2, monitoring, multi-account environments); strong Terraform (or equivalent Infrastructure-as-Code) experience; Python at a software-engineering level (Go or Java equally acceptable); strong Linux and production troubleshooting; observability, incident response, and SRE practice on critical services; a demonstrated bias towards automating operational workflows rather than running manual procedures; hands-on experience with at least one production NoSQL or distributed data system (DynamoDB, Cassandra, ScyllaDB, a wide-column store, a distributed key-value store, or similar); and full overlap with Netherlands business hours.

Good-to-have requirements include: in-depth DynamoDB knowledge (data modelling, single-table design, partitioning and hot-key behaviour, on-demand vs. provisioned capacity, GSI and LSI, Streams, Global Tables, PITR, backup and restore operational patterns); agentic SDLC experience (AI-assisted software engineering, coding agents, or automation using AI agents across development, testing, review, deployment, incident response, or operational workflows) as a strong differentiator; experience building internal platforms or self-service infrastructure for other engineering teams; large-scale migrations or infrastructure modernisation; replacing manual operations with APIs, controllers, or automated workflows; Kubernetes; and highly available service design across regions or availability zones.

The profile emphasises comfort moving between software engineering, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and production operations, understanding how systems behave in production, working through ambiguous infrastructure problems independently, and leaving systems more automated and easier to operate.

Logistics: 40 hours per week, 8 hours per day; remote; start as early as possible; first contract to end of 2026 with option to extend; reports into the ADS NoSQL hiring manager.