Lead Confluent Kafka Engineer

About the role

An experienced Lead Confluent Kafka Engineer is sought to support the deployment, configuration, administration and production operations of Apache Kafka / Confluent Platform. The role requires strong hands-on expertise in Kafka, Java, Spring Boot, Linux, security, troubleshooting and data streaming, with responsibility for keeping Kafka environments reliable, secure and highly available. It is a full-time, onsite position in Islamabad.

Key responsibilities

• Deploy, configure and maintain Apache Kafka / Confluent Platform across development, UAT and production environments.
• Manage cluster provisioning, broker configuration, topics, partitioning, replication, retention and capacity.
• Handle upgrades, patches, rolling restarts, configuration changes and cluster expansion with minimal production impact.
• Support deployment of Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, Control Center and related services.
• Troubleshoot production issues such as broker problems, ISR, replication, consumer lag, throughput, latency, storage and connectivity.
• Configure Kafka security including TLS/mTLS, SASL, ACLs, certificates, keystores and truststores.
• Support Java/Spring Boot Kafka application deployments, including producer/consumer configuration and integration troubleshooting.
• Work with application, DevOps, infrastructure and security teams to onboard new Kafka use cases and promote changes.
• Support CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, configuration management and releases; perform health checks, capacity planning, performance tuning, incident management and root-cause analysis.
• Maintain operational documentation, deployment procedures, configuration standards and runbooks.
• Support high availability, disaster recovery, backup/restore and multi-cluster replication where applicable.

Required profile

• 5 to 10 years of experience.
• Minimum Bachelor's degree in a relevant field.
• Strong hands-on experience with Apache Kafka / Confluent Platform in production.
• Experience supporting Kafka in banking, telecom or other mission-critical environments is good to have.

Required skills

• Kafka architecture, brokers, partitions, replication, ISR, consumer groups, offsets, retention and delivery semantics.
• Java and Spring Boot for Kafka producer/consumer integrations.
• Linux, networking, JVM, troubleshooting and production support.
• Kafka security: TLS/mTLS, SASL, ACLs and certificates.
• Data streaming experience.
• Good to have: Kubernetes, OpenShift, Anthos, Helm, Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, Confluent Control Center, Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, Splunk, AppDynamics, Prometheus, Grafana, Kafka DR and multi-cluster replication.