Lead Confluent Kafka Engineer

We are seeking a highly skilled Lead Confluent Kafka Engineer to join our team in Islamabad. This role involves hands-on deployment, configuration, administration, and production support of Apache Kafka and the Confluent Platform. The ideal candidate will have extensive experience with Kafka ecosystems, Java, Spring Boot, Linux, and security, ensuring the delivery of reliable, secure, and highly available streaming data environments. This is a full-time, onsite position requiring 5 to 10 years of relevant experience and a minimum of a bachelor’s degree in a related field.

Key Responsibilities

- Deploy, configure, and maintain Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform across development, UAT, and production environments.
- Manage Kafka cluster provisioning, including broker configuration, topic creation, partitioning, replication, retention policies, and capacity planning.
- Perform Kafka upgrades, patching, rolling restarts, configuration changes, and cluster expansions with minimal disruption to production.
- Support deployment and maintenance of Kafka components such as Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, Control Center, and other supporting services.
- Troubleshoot production issues related to brokers, partitions, ISR, replication, consumer lag, throughput, latency, storage, and connectivity.
- Administer Kafka security configurations, including TLS/mTLS, SASL, ACLs, certificates, keystores, and truststores.
- Support Java/Spring Boot Kafka application deployments, focusing on producer and consumer configuration as well as integration troubleshooting.
- Collaborate with application, DevOps, infrastructure, and security teams to onboard new Kafka use cases and manage environment promotions.
- Assist with CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, configuration management, and release activities for Kafka and Kafka-based applications.
- Conduct health checks, capacity planning, performance tuning, incident management, and root-cause analysis.
- Maintain operational documentation, deployment procedures, configuration standards, and recovery/runbook documentation.
- Support high availability, disaster recovery, backup/restore, and multi-cluster replication strategies where applicable.

Required Qualifications

- Proven hands-on experience with 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 semantics.
- Expertise in Kafka deployment, configuration, upgrades, patching, and ongoing operational maintenance.
- Strong Java and Spring Boot skills for Kafka producer and consumer integration.
- Proficiency in Linux, networking, JVM tuning, troubleshooting, and production support.
- Experience with Kafka security features such as TLS/mTLS, SASL, ACLs, and certificate management.
- Familiarity with Confluent Kafka components and data streaming concepts.

Preferred Qualifications and Benefits

- Experience with container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes, OpenShift, Anthos, and Helm for containerized Kafka deployments.
- Knowledge of Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, and Confluent Control Center.
- Familiarity with CI/CD tools such as Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, or equivalents.
- Monitoring experience using tools like Splunk, AppDynamics, Prometheus, Grafana, or Confluent’s native monitoring solutions.
- Exposure to Kafka disaster recovery, multi-cluster architectures, replication, and migration projects.
- Prior experience supporting Kafka in mission-critical sectors such as banking or telecommunications.

This role offers the opportunity to lead Kafka initiatives within a dynamic environment, working closely with cross-functional teams to ensure robust data streaming solutions. Candidates with a passion for Kafka technologies and a strong operational mindset are encouraged to apply.