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 and hold at least a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field. This role involves supporting Kafka deployment, configuration, maintenance, and troubleshooting across development, UAT, and production environments. The candidate will work closely with senior engineers and cross-functional teams to ensure the smooth operation and scalability of Kafka clusters and related components.

Key Responsibilities

- Support deployment, configuration, and maintenance of Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform across multiple environments including development, UAT, and production.
- Assist with Kafka cluster provisioning, broker configuration, topic management (creation, partitioning, replication, retention), and capacity planning.
- Participate in Kafka upgrades, patching, rolling restarts, configuration changes, and cluster expansion under senior guidance.
- Support Kafka ecosystem components such as Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, and Confluent Control Center.
- Monitor Kafka clusters 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 engineers.
- Maintain operational documentation, deployment procedures, configuration standards, troubleshooting guides, and runbooks.
- Support high availability, disaster recovery, backup/restore, and multi-cluster replication activities as needed.
- Participate in production support and assist in resolving Kafka-related incidents.
- Proactively monitor Kafka environments to identify and resolve performance, availability, storage, and consumer lag issues.

Required Qualifications

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

Preferred Qualifications

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

This position offers an excellent opportunity to develop your Kafka engineering skills within a dynamic and collaborative environment. If you meet the qualifications and are eager to contribute to a growing team, we encourage you to apply.