Junior Kafka Engineer

We are seeking a Junior Kafka Engineer to join our team on a full-time basis at our Islamabad office. 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 activities across various environments. This role requires a strong foundation in Kafka architecture, security, and operational best practices, along with hands-on experience in Java and Spring Boot integrations. The position involves close collaboration with application, DevOps, infrastructure, and security teams to ensure smooth Kafka operations and support production environments effectively.

Key Responsibilities

- Support deployment, configuration, and maintenance of Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform across development, UAT, and production environments.
- Assist with Kafka cluster provisioning, broker configuration, topic creation, partitioning, replication, retention, and capacity management.
- Support Kafka upgrades, patches, rolling restarts, configuration changes, and cluster expansion under senior engineer guidance.
- Manage Kafka components such as Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, Confluent Control Center, and related services.
- Monitor and troubleshoot Kafka issues including brokers, partitions, ISR, replication, consumer lag, throughput, latency, storage, and connectivity.
- Implement and support 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 promote changes across environments.
- 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 senior team support.
- 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 issues related to performance, availability, storage, and consumer lag.

Required Qualifications

- Minimum of 3 years of relevant IT or software engineering experience with hands-on exposure to Apache Kafka or Confluent Platform.
- Practical experience working with Apache Kafka 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 in Kafka deployment, configuration, administration, monitoring, and operational maintenance.
- Hands-on knowledge of 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, including TLS/mTLS, SASL, ACLs, certificates, keystores, and truststores.
- Experience working with Confluent Kafka or Confluent Platform.
- Familiarity with real-time data streaming and event-driven architectures.
- Ability to troubleshoot basic Kafka issues such as 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 equivalent tools.
- Monitoring experience with tools like Splunk, AppDynamics, Prometheus, Grafana, or Confluent monitoring tools.
- Understanding 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.

This role offers an excellent opportunity to deepen your expertise in Kafka technologies within a dynamic and collaborative environment. If you have a passion for real-time data streaming and enjoy working in a fast-paced setting, we encourage you to apply.