Lead Confluent Kafka Engineer

About the role

We are looking for a Lead Confluent Kafka Engineer to design, implement and operate Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform solutions across development, UAT and production environments. The role requires deep technical expertise in Kafka, Java, Spring Boot and Linux, as well as strong problem‑solving skills to ensure a secure, scalable and highly available messaging infrastructure.

Key responsibilities

• Install, configure, administer and support Kafka/Confluent clusters, including broker setup, topic management, partitioning, replication and capacity planning.
• Execute upgrades, patch deployments, rolling restarts and scaling activities while maintaining production stability.
• Deploy and maintain ecosystem components such as Schema Registry, Kafka Connect and Confluent Control Center.
• Investigate and resolve production issues related to broker performance, consumer lag, latency, throughput and storage utilization.
• Configure and maintain security controls (TLS/mTLS, SASL, ACLs, certificates, keystores, truststores).
• Support Java/Spring Boot applications that produce and consume Kafka messages.
• Collaborate with application, infrastructure, DevOps and security teams to onboard new workloads and promote environments.
• Contribute to CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation and release management for Kafka platforms.
• Perform health monitoring, performance tuning, capacity forecasting and incident response.
• Create and maintain operational documentation, runbooks and disaster‑recovery procedures.

Required profile

• 5‑10 years of hands‑on experience supporting Apache Kafka/Confluent Platform in production.
• Strong background in Java development with Spring Boot and Linux system administration.
• Proven experience implementing Kafka security (TLS/mTLS, SASL, ACLs) and managing certificates.
• Experience working in enterprise environments such as banking or telecommunications.

Required skills

• Apache Kafka, Confluent Platform, Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, Confluent Control Center
• Java, Spring Boot
• Linux administration, networking, JVM performance tuning
• TLS/mTLS, SASL, ACLs, certificate management
• Kubernetes, OpenShift, Anthos, Helm
• CI/CD tools (Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps)
• Monitoring tools (Splunk, AppDynamics, Prometheus, Grafana)