We are seeking a Senior Kafka Engineer with strong experience in Confluent Cloud and Apache Kafka platform engineering. The role involves designing, deploying, administering, and supporting enterprise Kafka environments, with a strong focus on automation, reliability, and production support.
Roles and Responsibilities
- Design, install, configure, deploy, and administer Confluent Cloud/Kafka platforms.
- Provide 24x7 on-call production support and resolve critical issues.
- Partner with architecture teams to align platform design with modern engineering practices.
- Develop automation for platform operations including deployments, restarts, patching, and upgrades.
- Manage platform patching, roadmap execution, and mentor junior engineers.
- Ensure stability, scalability, and performance of Kafka-based systems.
Required Experience
- 5+ years in platform engineering or middleware technologies with focus on Kafka/Confluent Cloud.
- 3+ years of hands-on experience in Kafka/Confluent installation, configuration, and administration.
- 3+ years of experience with UNIX/Linux systems, including storage, file systems, and networking.
- Strong understanding of distributed systems and messaging architectures (3+ years).
- 2+ years of experience creating technical documentation and operational runbooks.
Required Technical Skills
- 3+ years of production support experience with Kafka/Confluent platforms (troubleshooting and defect resolution).
- Strong experience in DevSecOps and Infrastructure as Code (IaC).
- Hands-on experience with automation tools such as Ansible, Terraform, Puppet, or similar.
- Proficiency with GitHub or other version control systems.
- Strong Linux troubleshooting skills, including log analysis and system diagnostics.
Preferred Skills
- Experience with application performance monitoring tools (Dynatrace, VisualVM, JProfiler).
- Knowledge of JVM tuning, web container tuning, and database connection pool optimization.
- Exposure to CI/CD pipelines, Agile, and DevSecOps practices.
- Experience with Terraform and infrastructure automation frameworks.