Confluent Kafka Engineer

We are looking for a highly experienced Lead Confluent Kafka Engineer to lead the implementation, administration, and operational support of Apache Kafka and the Confluent Platform. The ideal candidate will have strong hands-on skills in Kafka, Java, Spring Boot, Linux, security, troubleshooting, and data streaming technologies. This role demands expertise in delivering secure, scalable, and highly available messaging platforms within complex production environments. The position is full-time and onsite in Islamabad, requiring 5 to 10 years of relevant experience and a bachelor’s degree or higher in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field.

Key Responsibilities

- Install, configure, administer, and support Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform across Development, UAT, and Production environments.
- Manage Kafka cluster setup including broker configuration, topic management, partitioning, replication strategies, retention policies, and capacity planning.
- Perform Kafka upgrades, patch deployments, rolling restarts, configuration updates, and cluster scaling while ensuring production stability.
- Deploy and maintain Kafka ecosystem components such as Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, Control Center, and related services.
- Investigate and resolve production issues related to broker performance, partitions, ISR, replication, consumer lag, latency, throughput, storage utilization, and connectivity.
- Configure and maintain Kafka security controls including TLS/mTLS, SASL authentication, ACLs, certificates, keystores, and truststores.
- Support and troubleshoot Java/Spring Boot Kafka applications, including producer and consumer integrations.
- Collaborate with application, infrastructure, DevOps, and security teams to onboard new Kafka workloads and manage environment promotions.
- Contribute to CI/CD processes, deployment automation, release management, and configuration control for Kafka platforms and applications.
- Conduct regular health monitoring, performance optimization, capacity forecasting, incident response, and root cause analysis.
- Create and maintain operational documentation, deployment guidelines, configuration standards, disaster recovery procedures, and runbooks.
- Support high availability, backup and recovery operations, disaster recovery strategies, and multi-cluster replication architectures as needed.

Required Qualifications

- Proven hands-on experience supporting Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform in production environments.
- Deep understanding of Kafka architecture including brokers, partitions, replication, ISR, consumer groups, offsets, retention policies, and delivery guarantees.
- Experience with Kafka installation, configuration, upgrades, patch management, and ongoing operational support.
- Strong development and integration skills using Java and Spring Boot for Kafka-based applications.
- Solid expertise in Linux administration, networking, JVM performance tuning, production troubleshooting, and operational support.
- Experience implementing and managing Kafka security including TLS/mTLS, SASL, ACLs, and certificate management.
- Hands-on experience with Confluent Kafka solutions.
- Practical knowledge of data streaming platforms and real-time event-driven architectures.

Preferred Qualifications

- Experience with Kubernetes, OpenShift, Anthos, Helm, and containerized Kafka deployments.
- Familiarity with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, and Confluent Control Center.
- Experience working with CI/CD platforms such as Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, or similar tools.
- Monitoring and observability skills using Splunk, AppDynamics, Prometheus, Grafana, or Confluent monitoring solutions.
- Knowledge of Kafka disaster recovery, multi-cluster deployments, replication strategies, and migration projects.
- Experience supporting Kafka environments in banking, telecommunications, or other business-critical enterprise domains.

This role offers the opportunity to work at the forefront of data streaming technology, contributing to mission-critical systems in a dynamic and collaborative environment.