Junior Kafka Engineer

We are seeking a Junior Kafka Engineer to join our team onsite in Islamabad. The ideal candidate will have a minimum of three years of experience working with Apache Kafka or the Confluent Platform, supporting deployment, configuration, and maintenance across various environments including development, UAT, and production. This role requires a solid understanding of Kafka architecture and hands-on experience with Kafka clusters, security configurations, and Java/Spring Boot application integrations. The candidate will work closely with cross-functional teams to ensure smooth Kafka operations and support continuous improvement initiatives.

Key Responsibilities

- Support deployment, configuration, and maintenance of Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform components across development, UAT, and production environments.
- Assist with Kafka cluster provisioning, broker configuration, topic management including partitioning, replication, retention, and capacity planning.
- Support Kafka upgrades, patches, rolling restarts, configuration changes, and cluster expansion under senior engineers’ guidance.
- Manage Kafka components such as Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, and Confluent Control Center.
- Monitor Kafka environments and troubleshoot issues related to brokers, partitions, ISR, replication, consumer lag, throughput, latency, storage, and connectivity.
- Implement and maintain Kafka security configurations including TLS/mTLS, SASL, ACLs, certificates, keystores, and truststores.
- Assist with Java/Spring Boot Kafka application deployments, including producer and consumer configuration and integration troubleshooting.
- Collaborate with application, DevOps, infrastructure, and security teams to onboard Kafka use cases and manage environment changes.
- Support CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, configuration management, and release activities for Kafka and Kafka-based applications.
- Perform routine health checks, monitoring, performance analysis, incident troubleshooting, and root-cause analysis with support from senior team members.
- Maintain operational documentation, deployment procedures, configuration standards, troubleshooting guides, and runbooks.
- Support high availability, disaster recovery, backup/restore, and multi-cluster replication activities where applicable.
- Participate in production support and assist with resolving Kafka-related incidents.
- Proactively monitor Kafka environments to identify and resolve performance, availability, storage, and consumer lag issues.

Required Qualifications

- Minimum of 3 years of relevant IT or software engineering experience with hands-on exposure to Apache Kafka or Confluent Platform in development or production environments.
- Strong understanding of Kafka architecture including brokers, topics, partitions, replication, ISR, consumer groups, producers, consumers, offsets, retention, and delivery semantics.
- Experience with Kafka deployment, configuration, administration, monitoring, and operational maintenance.
- Proficiency in Java and Spring Boot, especially for Kafka producer and consumer integrations.
- Good working knowledge of Linux, networking fundamentals, JVM concepts, troubleshooting, and production support.
- Understanding or hands-on experience with Kafka security mechanisms such as TLS/mTLS, SASL, ACLs, certificates, keystores, and truststores.
- Familiarity with Confluent Kafka or Confluent Platform.
- Understanding of real-time data streaming and event-driven architectures.
- Ability to troubleshoot common Kafka issues including consumer lag, broker connectivity, partitions, replication, offsets, and application integrations.

Preferred Qualifications and Additional Skills

- Exposure to Kubernetes, OpenShift, Anthos, Helm, or containerized Kafka deployments.
- Experience or familiarity with Kafka Connect, Schema Registry, and Confluent Control Center.
- CI/CD experience using Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, or similar tools.
- Monitoring experience with tools such as Splunk, AppDynamics, Prometheus, Grafana, or Confluent monitoring tools.
- Knowledge of Kafka disaster recovery, multi-cluster architectures, replication, and migration activities.
- Experience working with Kafka in banking, telecom, financial services, or other mission-critical environments.
- Exposure to Docker and containerized applications.
- Basic understanding of capacity planning, performance tuning, and Kafka cluster monitoring.

Candidates should hold at least a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field. This is a full-time onsite position based in Islamabad, offering the opportunity to work in a dynamic environment with a focus on real-time data streaming technologies.