Kafka Platform Engineer

• Strong hands-on experience with Apache Kafka / Confluent Kafka (3+ years)
• Kafka cluster installation and administration
• Topic management, partitioning, replication
• Quotas and ACL management
• Experience with Kafka Connect (connector development/configuration)
• Experience with ksqlDB or Kafka Streams
• Experience with Schema Registry (Avro, Protobuf, JSON)
• Kafka monitoring and performance tuning using Prometheus, Grafana, JMX, Kafka Metrics
• Incident response in production Kafka environments
• Basic Kubernetes/OpenShift experience for Kafka deployment in containerized environments
• Networking and security knowledge: TLS/SSL, Kerberos, SASL

Nice to have:

• GitOps automation: ArgoCD, Flux, Helm Charts, CRDs
• Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Terraform for Cloud and Kubernetes
• Hybrid cloud experience (Azure + On-Premises)
• Container security frameworks: OPA, Kyverno, image scanning
• Disaster Recovery (DR) and High Availability (HA) strategies: Raft Mode, ZooKeeper-Free Kafka, MirrorMaker
• Kafka capacity and cost optimization: Dynamic scaling, tiered storage

• Design, deploy, and operate scalable Apache Kafka clusters on-premises, cloud, and OpenShift
• Configure and maintain Kafka components: Kafka Brokers, Kafka Connect, ksqlDB, Schema Registry, and MirrorMaker
• Implement authentication and security using TLS/SSL, SASL/SCRAM, ACLs, and Kerberos
• Monitor and optimize performance with Prometheus, Grafana, JMX, and Kafka Metrics
• Incident management: rapid response, root cause analysis, system recovery, post-mortem documentation
• Automate infrastructure using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and GitOps
• Capacity planning with performance and scalability optimization including partitioning, tiered storage, and dynamic scaling
• Support platform architecture decisions related to Kafka
• Create technical documentation, best practices, and training materials for operations and development teams