diff --git a/runners/flink/flink_runner.gradle b/runners/flink/flink_runner.gradle
index c61a329d2cc1..a4b6af7d70b6 100644
--- a/runners/flink/flink_runner.gradle
+++ b/runners/flink/flink_runner.gradle
@@ -274,8 +274,6 @@ def createValidatesRunnerTask(Map m) {
     )
     // maxParallelForks decreased from 4 in order to avoid OOM errors
     maxParallelForks 2
-    def flinkConfDir = System.getProperty("user.dir") + "/runners/flink/src/test/validatesRunnerConfig"
-    environment("FLINK_CONF_DIR", flinkConfDir)
     useJUnit {
       if (config.checkpointing) {
         includeCategories 'org.apache.beam.sdk.testing.UsesBundleFinalizer'
diff --git a/runners/flink/src/test/validatesRunnerConfig/flink-conf.yaml b/runners/flink/src/test/validatesRunnerConfig/flink-conf.yaml
deleted file mode 100644
index 3b075a095721..000000000000
--- a/runners/flink/src/test/validatesRunnerConfig/flink-conf.yaml
+++ /dev/null
@@ -1,22 +0,0 @@
-# Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one
-# or more contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file
-# distributed with this work for additional information
-# regarding copyright ownership.  The ASF licenses this file
-# to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the
-# "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance
-# with the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at
-#
-#  http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
-#
-# Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing,
-# software distributed under the License is distributed on an
-# "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY
-# KIND, either express or implied.  See the License for the
-# specific language governing permissions and limitations
-# under the License.
-#
-
-#parallelism.default: 23
-taskmanager.memory.network.fraction: 0.2
-taskmanager.memory.network.max: 1gb
-pipeline.operator-chaining.enabled: false