Lead Confluent Kafka Engineer

About the role

We are looking for a Lead Confluent Kafka Engineer to design, implement, and support high‑performance Kafka and Confluent Platform environments. The role requires deep technical expertise and the ability to collaborate across development, infrastructure, and security teams.

Key responsibilities

• Install, configure, and administer Apache Kafka/Confluent Platform across development, UAT, and production environments.
• Manage Kafka cluster setup, including broker configuration, topic management, partitioning, replication, retention policies, and capacity planning.
• Execute upgrades, patch deployments, rolling restarts, and scaling while maintaining production stability.
• Deploy and maintain ecosystem components such as Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, and Control Center.
• Investigate and resolve production issues related to performance, consumer lag, latency, storage, and connectivity.
• Configure and maintain security controls (TLS/mTLS, SASL, ACLs, certificates, keystores, truststores).
• Support Java/Spring Boot Kafka applications and collaborate on onboarding new workloads.
• Contribute to CI/CD pipelines, automation, release management, and operational documentation.

Required profile

• 5‑10 years of hands‑on experience supporting Apache Kafka/Confluent Platform in production.
• Strong background in Java and Spring Boot development for Kafka‑based applications.
• Solid Linux administration, networking, and JVM performance tuning skills.
• Experience implementing Kafka security (TLS/mTLS, SASL, ACLs) and managing certificates.

Required skills

• Apache Kafka
• Confluent Platform
• Java
• Spring Boot
• Linux
• TLS/mTLS
• SASL
• ACLs
• Kafka Connect
• Schema Registry
• Confluent Control Center
• Kubernetes
• OpenShift
• Anthos
• Helm