Lead Kafka Developer/Admin

About the role

We are seeking a Principal Kafka Engineer to lead the management, scaling, and optimization of our enterprise event-streaming ecosystem. The ideal candidate brings deep expertise in Apache/Confluent Kafka, applies object-oriented programming principles to advanced automation, and uses ITSM practices to support reliable, high-quality service delivery.

Responsibilities

• Deploy, configure, and maintain highly available Kafka clusters across on-premises and cloud environments, including Azure and GCP.
• Manage topics, partitions, and replication to ensure platform reliability.
• Design and build reusable frameworks, automation tools, and APIs using Java to simplify cluster provisioning, monitoring, and self-service onboarding.
• Manage the platform lifecycle through ITSM processes, including incident, problem, and change management, to reduce downtime and maintain SLA compliance.
• Implement and maintain security controls and authentication mechanisms.
• Monitor cluster health with tools such as dynaTrace, Prometheus, and Grafana. Perform capacity planning and tuning to support high-throughput data pipelines.
• Partner with DevOps and application teams to provide guidance on event-driven architecture and producer/consumer performance best practices.

Requirements

Experience: 3 5+ years of Kafka administration experience and 10+ years in software development or systems engineering.

• Expertise in Apache Kafka or Confluent Platform, including Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, Avro, and KSQL.
• Proficient in Cluster Management - Zookeeper, KRaft
• Strong object-oriented programming skills; Java, Go, Python
• Hands-on experience with Infrastructure as Code tools such as Terraform, Ansible, or Salt.
• Java backend development experience with Spring Boot.
• Solid understanding of software design patterns.
• Strong knowledge of architecture and design concepts, with the ability to create and maintain architecture artifacts.
• Proficient in containerization technology such as Docker, Kubernetes etc.
• Expertise in DevOps, CI/CD, and GitHub Actions.
• Expertise in Domain Driven Design and Enterprise Application Integration.
• Experience with observability, telemetry, and APM tools such as dynaTrace.
• Good understanding of networking, storage, virtualization, and other infrastructure architecture.
• Self-starter with a goal-oriented mindset.
• Excellent communication, negotiation, and problem-solving skills.
• Expertise in supporting a Highly Available Low Latent Enterprise Application in Production environment(s).
• Experience working with globally distributed team(s).
• Frameworks: Solid understanding of ITSM/ITIL frameworks and Agile methodologies.

Qualifications

• Front-end development experience with Angular, React (preferred), or other TypeScript-based frameworks.
• Expertise in FinOps.
• Experience working in platform teams.

Preferred Certifications: Cloud provider certifications, such as Azure Certified Solutions Architect; Confluent Certified Administrator for Apache Kafka (CCAAK); TOGAF