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 strong foundation in Kafka architecture, security, and operational support, along with hands-on experience in Java and Spring Boot for Kafka application integration. The candidate will collaborate closely with application, DevOps, infrastructure, and security teams to ensure smooth onboarding and management of Kafka use cases.

Key Responsibilities

- Support deployment, configuration, and maintenance of Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform across multiple environments.
- Assist in 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 engineer guidance.
- Manage Kafka components such as Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, and Confluent Control Center.
- Monitor and troubleshoot Kafka issues related to 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 troubleshooting integration issues.
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to onboard Kafka use cases and facilitate environment changes.
- Support CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, configuration management, and release activities for Kafka and Kafka-based applications.
- Conduct routine health checks, 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 in 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 the 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 with Kafka deployment, configuration, administration, monitoring, and operational maintenance.
- Hands-on knowledge of Java and Spring Boot, particularly for Kafka producer and consumer integrations.
- Proficiency in 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.
- Experience working with Confluent Kafka or Confluent Platform.
- Familiarity with real-time data streaming and event-driven architectures.
- Ability to troubleshoot Kafka issues including consumer lag, broker connectivity, partitions, replication, offsets, and application integration problems.

Preferred Qualifications

- 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.
- 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 knowledge of capacity planning, performance tuning, and Kafka cluster monitoring.

This role offers an excellent opportunity to deepen your expertise in Kafka technologies while working in a dynamic, collaborative environment focused on mission-critical data streaming solutions.