Junior Kafka Engineer

About the role

A full-time, on-site position for a Junior Kafka Engineer in Islamabad. The role supports the deployment, configuration and maintenance of Apache Kafka / Confluent Platform across development, UAT and production environments, working closely with senior engineers and cross-functional teams.

Key responsibilities

• Support deployment, configuration and maintenance of Kafka and Confluent Platform in dev, UAT and production
• Assist with cluster provisioning, broker configuration, topic creation, partitioning, replication, retention and capacity management
• Support upgrades, patches, rolling restarts, configuration changes and cluster expansion under senior engineers' guidance
• Maintain Kafka components such as Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, Confluent Control Center and related services
• Monitor and troubleshoot brokers, partitions, ISR, replication, consumer lag, throughput, latency, storage and connectivity
• Configure Kafka security (TLS/mTLS, SASL, ACLs, certificates, keystores, truststores)
• Assist with Java/Spring Boot Kafka application deployments, including producer and consumer configuration
• Work with application, DevOps, infrastructure and security teams to onboard Kafka use cases and promote changes
• Support CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, configuration management and releases; perform health checks, performance analysis and incident troubleshooting
• Maintain operational documentation, runbooks and deployment procedures; support high availability, disaster recovery, backup/restore and multi-cluster replication
• Take part in production support and resolve Kafka-related incidents

Required profile

• Minimum 3 years of relevant IT/software engineering experience with hands-on Apache Kafka / Confluent Platform exposure
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology or a related field
• Good understanding of Kafka architecture (brokers, topics, partitions, replication, ISR, consumer groups, producers, consumers, offsets, retention, delivery semantics)
• Hands-on knowledge of Kafka deployment, configuration, administration, monitoring and operational maintenance
• Understanding of real-time data streaming and event-driven architectures

Required skills

• Java and Spring Boot, especially for Kafka producer and consumer integrations
• Linux, networking fundamentals, JVM concepts, troubleshooting and production support
• Kafka security (TLS/mTLS, SASL, ACLs, certificates, keystores, truststores)
• Confluent Kafka / Confluent Platform
• Good-to-have: Kubernetes, OpenShift, Anthos, Helm, Docker, Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, Confluent Control Center, Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, Splunk, AppDynamics, Prometheus, Grafana