Kafka Engineer

Job Summary

We are seeking an experienced Kafka Engineer to architect, deploy, and operate large-scale Apache Kafka and Confluent platform environments supporting mission-critical event-driven workloads.

Key Responsibilities

• Architect, deploy, and operate large-scale Apache Kafka or Confluent Platform clusters across on-prem and cloud environments.
• Design partitioning, replication, and topic strategies that balance throughput, durability, and operational simplicity.
• Implement strong security on Kafka clusters using SASL, mTLS, ACLs, RBAC, and integration with corporate IdPs.
• Operate Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, KSQL/ksqlDB, and Kafka Streams in production.
• Build and operate Kafka Connect pipelines integrating sources and sinks across enterprise systems.
• Design HA/DR strategies for Kafka, including MirrorMaker 2, Cluster Linking, and multi-region active-active patterns.
• Build CI/CD pipelines for Kafka topic, ACL, and connector configurations using GitOps patterns.
• Implement comprehensive observability using Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, or Confluent Control Center.
• Drive Kafka cost and capacity optimization through right-sizing and storage tiering.
• Onboard application teams to Kafka with clear patterns, templates, and best practices.
• Lead incident response and post-incident reviews for streaming workloads, applying disciplined engineering practices and partnering closely with stakeholders to ensure outcomes are durable, well-documented, and aligned with broader team and platform standards.
• Mentor and coach junior and mid-level engineers through code review, design review, pair programming, and structured knowledge sharing, helping the broader team grow in technical maturity and confidence over time.
• Maintain comprehensive, current technical documentation — including architecture diagrams, design decisions, configuration references, runbooks, and operational procedures — so that the system remains supportable, auditable, and easy to onboard new engineers onto over time.
• Continuously evaluate emerging streaming technologies (Pulsar, Redpanda, AWS MSK, Azure Event Hubs).

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
• Five or more years of experience operating Apache Kafka or Confluent Platform in production.
• Deep, hands-on knowledge of Kafka internals (partitions, replication, ISRs, consumer groups).
• Strong experience with Kafka security (SASL, mTLS, ACLs, RBAC).
• Hands-on experience with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, and either Kafka Streams or ksqlDB.
• Experience with HA/DR strategies for Kafka.
• Strong scripting skills in Python, Bash, or Go.
• Hands-on experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Ansible).
• Working knowledge of observability tooling for Kafka.
• Excellent troubleshooting, communication, and documentation skills.
• Confluent Certified Administrator or Developer credentials.
• Experience operating Kafka on Kubernetes (Strimzi, Confluent Operator).
• Exposure to managed Kafka services (AWS MSK, Azure Event Hubs Kafka API).
• Experience with data governance and lineage for streaming data.

Qualifications

• Experience with stream processing frameworks (Flink, Spark Streaming).

Skills

• Technical expertise in Kafka and Confluent Platform.
• Strong problem-solving and analytical skills.
• Ability to work independently and collaboratively.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Proficiency in relevant tools and technologies.

Benefits

Not specified.

Pay

$100k to $150k per annum.

Schedule

Full-time, remote.