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 and the Confluent Platform. This role involves supporting the deployment, configuration, and maintenance of Kafka environments across development, UAT, and production stages. The candidate will work closely with senior engineers and cross-functional teams to ensure smooth Kafka operations, troubleshoot issues, and assist with application integrations, particularly involving Java and Spring Boot.

Key Responsibilities

- Support deployment, configuration, and maintenance of Apache Kafka and Confluent Platform across various environments including development, UAT, and production.
- 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 expansions under senior guidance.
- Manage Kafka components such as Schema Registry, Kafka Connect, Confluent Control Center, and related services.
- 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 integration troubleshooting.
- Collaborate with application, DevOps, infrastructure, and security 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 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 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 of 3 years of relevant IT or software engineering experience with hands-on exposure to Apache Kafka and 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 in Kafka deployment, configuration, administration, monitoring, and operational maintenance.
- Hands-on knowledge of Java and Spring Boot, especially 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 features such as TLS/mTLS, SASL, ACLs, certificates, keystores, and truststores.
- Experience working with Confluent Kafka and the Confluent Platform.
- Familiarity with real-time data streaming and event-driven architectures.
- Ability to troubleshoot basic Kafka issues including consumer lag, broker connectivity, partitions, replication, offsets, and application integrations.

Preferred Qualifications

- Exposure to Kubernetes, OpenShift, Anthos, Helm, or other 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 processes.
- Experience in mission-critical environments such as banking, telecom, or financial services.
- Exposure to Docker and containerized applications.
- Basic knowledge of capacity planning, performance tuning, and Kafka cluster monitoring.

This position offers an excellent opportunity to grow your expertise in Kafka technologies while working in a dynamic and collaborative environment.